Meta-Learning at Scale for Large Language Models via Low-Rank Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces ABMLL, a scalable meta-learning method for large language models that improves multi-dataset generalization and combines meta-learning with in-context learning.

Contribution

It adapts amortized Bayesian meta-learning to large language models using LoRA, enhancing multi-dataset generalization and scalability.

Findings

ABMLL outperforms existing methods on CrossFit and Unified-QA datasets.

Supports effective generalization across multiple datasets.

Combines meta-learning with in-context learning for further improvements.

Abstract

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a cost-effective way to incorporate information from a specific dataset. However, when a problem requires incorporating information from multiple datasets - as in few shot learning - generalization across datasets can be limited, driving up training costs. As a consequence, other approaches such as in-context learning are typically used in this setting. To address this challenge, we introduce an efficient method for adapting the weights of LLMs to multiple distributions, Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning for LoRA (ABMLL). This method builds on amortized Bayesian meta-learning for smaller models, adapting this approach to LLMs by reframing where local and global variables are defined in LoRA and using a new hyperparameter to balance reconstruction accuracy and the fidelity of task-specific parameters to the global ones. ABMLL supports effective generalization across datasets and scales to large models such as Llama3-8B and Qwen2-7B, outperforming existing methods on the CrossFit and Unified-QA datasets in terms of both accuracy and expected calibration error. We show that meta-learning can also be combined with in-context learning, resulting in further improvements in both these datasets and legal and chemistry applications.