Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP

Neil Houlsby · Andrei Giurgiu · Stanislaw Jastrzebski · Bruna Morrone · Quentin de Laroussilhe · Andrea Gesmundo · Mona Attariyan · Sylvain Gelly

Pacific Ballroom #102

Keywords: [ Natural Language Processing ] [ Transfer and Multitask Learning ]


Abstract: Fine-tuning large pretrained models is an effective transfer mechanism in NLP. However, in the presence of many downstream tasks, fine-tuning is parameter inefficient: an entire new model is required for every task. As an alternative, we propose transfer with adapter modules. Adapter modules yield a compact and extensible model; they add only a few trainable parameters per task, and new tasks can be added without revisiting previous ones. The parameters of the original network remain fixed, yielding a high degree of parameter sharing. To demonstrate adapter's effectiveness, we transfer the recently proposed BERT Transformer model to $26$ diverse text classification tasks, including the GLUE benchmark. Adapters attain near state-of-the-art performance, whilst adding only a few parameters per task. On GLUE, we attain within $0.8\%$ of the performance of full fine-tuning, adding only $3.6\%$ parameters per task. By contrast, fine-tuning trains $100\%$ of the parameters per task.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content