Promptintern: Saving Inference Costs By Internalizing Recurrent Prompt During Large Language Model Fine-tuning

Zou Jiaru, Zhou Mengyu, Li Tao, Han Shi, Zhang Dongmei. Arxiv 2024

[Paper]    
Applications Efficiency And Optimization Fine Tuning Pretraining Methods Prompting Reinforcement Learning Training Techniques

Large language models (LLMs) have played a fundamental role in various natural language processing tasks with powerful prompt techniques. However, in real-world applications, there are often similar prompt components for repeated queries, which causes significant computational burdens during inference. Existing prompt compression and direct fine-tuning methods aim to tackle these challenges, yet they frequently struggle to strike an optimal balance between cost-efficiency and performance effectiveness, especially in complex tasks such as NL2Code. In this paper, we propose a novel method namely PromptIntern to internalize the prompt knowledge into model parameters via progressive fine-tuning. Our method enables LLMs to emulate the human learning process for a new task, where detailed templates and examples in a prompt are gradually internalized and phased out progressively as the model grows accustomed to the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces inference tokens over 90%, speedups inference by 4.2 times, and saves 88.3% monetary cost.

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