XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning

Fang Ma, Chen Zhang, Lei Ren, Jingang Wang, Qifan Wang, Wei Wu, Xiaojun Quan, Dawei Song


Abstract
Prompt tuning learns soft prompts to condition the frozen Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. While prompt tuning has gradually reached the performance level of fine-tuning as the model scale increases, there is still a large performance gap between prompt tuning and fine-tuning for models of moderate and small scales (typically less than 11B parameters). In this paper, we empirically show that the trained prompt tokens can have a negative impact on a downstream task and thus degrade its performance. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel Prompt tuning model with an eXtremely small scale (XPrompt) under the regime of lottery tickets hypothesis. Specifically, XPrompt eliminates the negative prompt tokens at different granularity levels through a hierarchical structured pruning, yielding a more parameter-efficient prompt yet with a competitive performance. Comprehensive experiments are carried out on the SuperGLUE tasks, and the results indicate that XPrompt is able to close the performance gap at smaller model scales.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.758
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11033–11047
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.758
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.758
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fang Ma, Chen Zhang, Lei Ren, Jingang Wang, Qifan Wang, Wei Wu, Xiaojun Quan, and Dawei Song. 2022. XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11033–11047, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning (Ma et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.758.pdf