Mini-Model Adaptation: Efficiently Extending Pretrained Models to New Languages via Aligned Shallow Training

Kelly Marchisio, Patrick Lewis, Yihong Chen, Mikel Artetxe


Abstract
Prior work shows that it is possible to expand pretrained Masked Language Models (MLMs) to new languages by learning a new set of embeddings, while keeping the transformer body frozen. Despite learning a small subset of parameters, this approach is not compute-efficient, as training the new embeddings requires a full forward and backward pass over the entire model. We propose mini-model adaptation, a compute-efficient alternative that builds a shallow mini-model from a fraction of a large model’s parameters. New language-specific embeddings can then be efficiently trained over the mini-model and plugged into the aligned large model for rapid cross-lingual transfer. We explore two approaches to learn mini-models: MINIJOINT, which jointly pretrains the primary model and the mini-model using a single transformer with a secondary MLM head at a middle layer; and MINIPOST, where we start from a regular pretrained model, build a mini-model by extracting and freezing a few layers, and learn a small number of parameters on top. Experiments on XNLI, MLQA and PAWS-X show that mini-model adaptation matches the performance of the standard approach using up to 2.3x less compute on average.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.338
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5474–5490
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.338
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.338
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kelly Marchisio, Patrick Lewis, Yihong Chen, and Mikel Artetxe. 2023. Mini-Model Adaptation: Efficiently Extending Pretrained Models to New Languages via Aligned Shallow Training. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 5474–5490, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mini-Model Adaptation: Efficiently Extending Pretrained Models to New Languages via Aligned Shallow Training (Marchisio et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.338.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.338.mp4