Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation

Xiang Lisa Li, Percy Liang


Abstract
Fine-tuning is the de facto way of leveraging large pretrained language models for downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning modifies all the language model parameters and therefore necessitates storing a full copy for each task. In this paper, we propose prefix-tuning, a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for natural language generation tasks, which keeps language model parameters frozen and instead optimizes a sequence of continuous task-specific vectors, which we call the prefix. Prefix-tuning draws inspiration from prompting for language models, allowing subsequent tokens to attend to this prefix as if it were “virtual tokens”. We apply prefix-tuning to GPT-2 for table-to-text generation and to BART for summarization. We show that by learning only 0.1% of the parameters, prefix-tuning obtains comparable performance in the full data setting, outperforms fine-tuning in low-data settings, and extrapolates better to examples with topics that are unseen during training.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.353
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4582–4597
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.353
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.353
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiang Lisa Li and Percy Liang. 2021. Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4582–4597, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation (Li & Liang, ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.353.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.353.mp4
Code
 XiangLi1999/PrefixTuning +  additional community code
Data
DART