ADePT: Adaptive Decomposed Prompt Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

TL;DR

ADePT introduces an adaptive prompt tuning method that learns token-specific embedding offsets via a neural network, enhancing model adaptation across diverse NLP tasks without increasing inference time or parameters.

Contribution

The paper proposes ADePT, a novel adaptive prompt tuning approach that improves generalization and optimization of token embeddings by using a neural network for token-specific offsets.

Findings

ADePT outperforms existing parameter-efficient tuning methods on 23 NLP tasks.

ADePT surpasses full fine-tuning in certain scenarios.

ADePT maintains inference speed and parameter count comparable to vanilla PT.

Abstract

Prompt Tuning (PT) enables the adaptation of Pre-trained Large Language Models (PLMs) to downstream tasks by optimizing a small amount of soft virtual tokens, which are prepended to the input token embeddings. Recently, Decomposed Prompt Tuning (DePT) has demonstrated superior adaptation capabilities by decomposing the soft prompt into a shorter soft prompt and a pair of low-rank matrices. The product of the pair of low-rank matrices is added to the input token embeddings to offset them. Additionally, DePT achieves faster inference compared to PT due to the shorter soft prompt. However, in this paper, we find that the position-based token embedding offsets of DePT restrict its ability to generalize across diverse model inputs, and that the shared embedding offsets across many token embeddings result in sub-optimization. To tackle these issues, we introduce Adaptive Decomposed Prompt Tuning (ADePT), which is composed of a short soft prompt and a shallow token-shared feed-forward neural network. ADePT utilizes the token-shared feed-forward neural network to learn the embedding offsets for each token, enabling adaptive embedding offsets that vary according to the model input and better optimization of token embedding offsets. This enables ADePT to achieve superior adaptation performance without requiring more inference time or additional trainable parameters compared to vanilla PT and its variants. In comprehensive experiments across 23 natural language processing tasks and 4 typical PLMs of different scales, ADePT consistently surpasses the other leading parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, and even outperforms the full fine-tuning in certain scenarios. We also provide a theoretical analysis towards ADePT. Code is available at https://github.com/HungerPWAY/ADePT.