ProSG: Using Prompt Synthetic Gradients to Alleviate Prompt Forgetting
  of RNN-like Language Models
Haotian Luo Kunming Wu Cheng Dai Sixian Ding Xinhao Chen
RNN-like language models are getting renewed attention from NLP researchers
in recent years and several models have made significant progress, which
demonstrates performance comparable to traditional transformers. However, due
to the recurrent nature of RNNs, this kind of language model can only store
information in a set of fixed-length state vectors. As a consequence, they
still suffer from forgetfulness though after a lot of improvements and
optimizations, when given complex instructions or prompts. As the prompted
generation is the main and most concerned function of LMs, solving the problem
of forgetting in the process of generation is no wonder of vital importance. In
this paper, focusing on easing the prompt forgetting during generation, we
proposed an architecture to teach the model memorizing prompt during generation
by synthetic gradient. To force the model to memorize the prompt, we derive the
states that encode the prompt, then transform it into model parameter
modification using low-rank gradient approximation, which hard-codes the prompt
into model parameters temporarily. We construct a dataset for experiments, and
the results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in solving the
problem of forgetfulness in the process of prompted generation. We will release
all the code upon acceptance.