Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP

Neil Houlsby, Andrei Giurgiu, Stanislaw Jastrzebski, Bruna Morrone, Quentin De Laroussilhe, Andrea Gesmundo, Mona Attariyan, Sylvain Gelly
Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 97:2790-2799, 2019.

Abstract

Fine-tuning large pretrained models is an effective transfer mechanism in NLP. However, in the presence of many downstream tasks, fine-tuning is parameter inefficient: an entire new model is required for every task. As an alternative, we propose transfer with adapter modules. Adapter modules yield a compact and extensible model; they add only a few trainable parameters per task, and new tasks can be added without revisiting previous ones. The parameters of the original network remain fixed, yielding a high degree of parameter sharing. To demonstrate adapter’s effectiveness, we transfer the recently proposed BERT Transformer model to $26$ diverse text classification tasks, including the GLUE benchmark. Adapters attain near state-of-the-art performance, whilst adding only a few parameters per task. On GLUE, we attain within $0.8%$ of the performance of full fine-tuning, adding only $3.6%$ parameters per task. By contrast, fine-tuning trains $100%$ of the parameters per task.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v97-houlsby19a, title = {Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for {NLP}}, author = {Houlsby, Neil and Giurgiu, Andrei and Jastrzebski, Stanislaw and Morrone, Bruna and De Laroussilhe, Quentin and Gesmundo, Andrea and Attariyan, Mona and Gelly, Sylvain}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {2790--2799}, year = {2019}, editor = {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Salakhutdinov, Ruslan}, volume = {97}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {09--15 Jun}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/houlsby19a/houlsby19a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/houlsby19a.html}, abstract = {Fine-tuning large pretrained models is an effective transfer mechanism in NLP. However, in the presence of many downstream tasks, fine-tuning is parameter inefficient: an entire new model is required for every task. As an alternative, we propose transfer with adapter modules. Adapter modules yield a compact and extensible model; they add only a few trainable parameters per task, and new tasks can be added without revisiting previous ones. The parameters of the original network remain fixed, yielding a high degree of parameter sharing. To demonstrate adapter’s effectiveness, we transfer the recently proposed BERT Transformer model to $26$ diverse text classification tasks, including the GLUE benchmark. Adapters attain near state-of-the-art performance, whilst adding only a few parameters per task. On GLUE, we attain within $0.8%$ of the performance of full fine-tuning, adding only $3.6%$ parameters per task. By contrast, fine-tuning trains $100%$ of the parameters per task.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP %A Neil Houlsby %A Andrei Giurgiu %A Stanislaw Jastrzebski %A Bruna Morrone %A Quentin De Laroussilhe %A Andrea Gesmundo %A Mona Attariyan %A Sylvain Gelly %B Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2019 %E Kamalika Chaudhuri %E Ruslan Salakhutdinov %F pmlr-v97-houlsby19a %I PMLR %P 2790--2799 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/houlsby19a.html %V 97 %X Fine-tuning large pretrained models is an effective transfer mechanism in NLP. However, in the presence of many downstream tasks, fine-tuning is parameter inefficient: an entire new model is required for every task. As an alternative, we propose transfer with adapter modules. Adapter modules yield a compact and extensible model; they add only a few trainable parameters per task, and new tasks can be added without revisiting previous ones. The parameters of the original network remain fixed, yielding a high degree of parameter sharing. To demonstrate adapter’s effectiveness, we transfer the recently proposed BERT Transformer model to $26$ diverse text classification tasks, including the GLUE benchmark. Adapters attain near state-of-the-art performance, whilst adding only a few parameters per task. On GLUE, we attain within $0.8%$ of the performance of full fine-tuning, adding only $3.6%$ parameters per task. By contrast, fine-tuning trains $100%$ of the parameters per task.
APA
Houlsby, N., Giurgiu, A., Jastrzebski, S., Morrone, B., De Laroussilhe, Q., Gesmundo, A., Attariyan, M. & Gelly, S.. (2019). Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP. Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 97:2790-2799 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/houlsby19a.html.

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