Parameter-efficient Weight Ensembling Facilitates Task-level Knowledge Transfer

Xingtai Lv, Ning Ding, Yujia Qin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Recent studies show that large-scale pre-trained language models could be efficaciously adapted to particular tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. The trained lightweight set of parameters, such as adapters, can be easily stored and shared as a capability equipped with the corresponding models. Owning many lightweight parameters, we focus on transferring them between tasks to acquire an improvement in performance of new tasks, the key point of which is to obtain the similarity between tasks. In this paper, we explore 5 parameter-efficient weight ensembling methods to achieve such transferability and verify the effectiveness of them. These methods extract the information of datasets and trained lightweight parameters from different perspectives to obtain the similarity between tasks, and weight the existing lightweight parameters according to the comparability to acquire a suitable module for the initialization of new tasks. We apply them to three parameter-efficient tuning methods and test them on a wide set of downstream tasks. Experimental results show that our methods show an improvement of 5%~8% over baselines and could largely facilitate task-level knowledge transfer.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
270–282
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.24
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.24
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xingtai Lv, Ning Ding, Yujia Qin, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. 2023. Parameter-efficient Weight Ensembling Facilitates Task-level Knowledge Transfer. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 270–282, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Parameter-efficient Weight Ensembling Facilitates Task-level Knowledge Transfer (Lv et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.24.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.24.mp4