@inproceedings{cheng-etal-2025-multi,
title = "Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding",
author = "Cheng, Zifeng and
Chen, Zhaoling and
Jiang, Zhiwei and
Yin, Yafeng and
Wang, Cong and
Ge, Shiping and
Gu, Qing",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.11/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.11",
pages = "192--208",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
abstract = "Recent large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) usually only provide users with the inference APIs, namely the emerging Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) setting. To adapt MaaS PLMs to downstream tasks without accessing their parameters and gradients, some existing methods focus on the output-side adaptation of PLMs, viewing the PLM as an encoder and then optimizing a task-specific decoder for decoding the output hidden states and class scores of the PLM. Despite the effectiveness of these methods, they only use a single prompt to query PLMs for decoding, leading to a heavy reliance on the quality of the adopted prompt. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Multi-Prompting Decoder (MPD) framework for MaaS adaptation. The core idea is to query PLMs with multiple different prompts for each sample, thereby obtaining multiple output hidden states and class scores from PLMs for subsequent decoding. Such multi-prompting decoding paradigm can simultaneously mitigate reliance on the quality of a single prompt, alleviate the issue of data scarcity under the few-shot setting, and provide richer knowledge extracted from PLMs. Specifically, we propose two decoding strategies: multi-prompting decoding with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting."
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<abstract>Recent large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) usually only provide users with the inference APIs, namely the emerging Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) setting. To adapt MaaS PLMs to downstream tasks without accessing their parameters and gradients, some existing methods focus on the output-side adaptation of PLMs, viewing the PLM as an encoder and then optimizing a task-specific decoder for decoding the output hidden states and class scores of the PLM. Despite the effectiveness of these methods, they only use a single prompt to query PLMs for decoding, leading to a heavy reliance on the quality of the adopted prompt. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Multi-Prompting Decoder (MPD) framework for MaaS adaptation. The core idea is to query PLMs with multiple different prompts for each sample, thereby obtaining multiple output hidden states and class scores from PLMs for subsequent decoding. Such multi-prompting decoding paradigm can simultaneously mitigate reliance on the quality of a single prompt, alleviate the issue of data scarcity under the few-shot setting, and provide richer knowledge extracted from PLMs. Specifically, we propose two decoding strategies: multi-prompting decoding with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding
%A Cheng, Zifeng
%A Chen, Zhaoling
%A Jiang, Zhiwei
%A Yin, Yafeng
%A Wang, Cong
%A Ge, Shiping
%A Gu, Qing
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-256-5
%F cheng-etal-2025-multi
%X Recent large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) usually only provide users with the inference APIs, namely the emerging Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) setting. To adapt MaaS PLMs to downstream tasks without accessing their parameters and gradients, some existing methods focus on the output-side adaptation of PLMs, viewing the PLM as an encoder and then optimizing a task-specific decoder for decoding the output hidden states and class scores of the PLM. Despite the effectiveness of these methods, they only use a single prompt to query PLMs for decoding, leading to a heavy reliance on the quality of the adopted prompt. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Multi-Prompting Decoder (MPD) framework for MaaS adaptation. The core idea is to query PLMs with multiple different prompts for each sample, thereby obtaining multiple output hidden states and class scores from PLMs for subsequent decoding. Such multi-prompting decoding paradigm can simultaneously mitigate reliance on the quality of a single prompt, alleviate the issue of data scarcity under the few-shot setting, and provide richer knowledge extracted from PLMs. Specifically, we propose two decoding strategies: multi-prompting decoding with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.11
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.11/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.11
%P 192-208
Markdown (Informal)
[Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.11/) (Cheng et al., Findings 2025)
ACL
- Zifeng Cheng, Zhaoling Chen, Zhiwei Jiang, Yafeng Yin, Cong Wang, Shiping Ge, and Qing Gu. 2025. Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 192–208, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.