Input-tuning: Adapting Unfamiliar Inputs To Frozen Pretrained Models

An Shengnan, Li Yifei, Lin Zeqi, Liu Qian, Chen Bei, Fu Qiang, Chen Weizhu, Zheng Nanning, Lou Jian-guang. Arxiv 2022

[Paper]    
Applications Attention Mechanism Fine Tuning Model Architecture Pretraining Methods Prompting Training Techniques

Recently the prompt-tuning paradigm has attracted significant attention. By only tuning continuous prompts with a frozen pre-trained language model (PLM), prompt-tuning takes a step towards deploying a shared frozen PLM to serve numerous downstream tasks. Although prompt-tuning shows good performance on certain natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, its effectiveness on natural language generation (NLG) tasks is still under-explored. In this paper, we argue that one of the factors hindering the development of prompt-tuning on NLG tasks is the unfamiliar inputs (i.e., inputs are linguistically different from the pretraining corpus). For example, our preliminary exploration reveals a large performance gap between prompt-tuning and fine-tuning when unfamiliar inputs occur frequently in NLG tasks. This motivates us to propose input-tuning, which fine-tunes both the continuous prompts and the input representations, leading to a more effective way to adapt unfamiliar inputs to frozen PLMs. Our proposed input-tuning is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. Experimental results on seven NLG tasks demonstrate that input-tuning is significantly and consistently better than prompt-tuning. Furthermore, on three of these tasks, input-tuning can achieve a comparable or even better performance than fine-tuning.

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