Efficient and Effective Prompt Tuning via Prompt Decomposition and Compressed Outer Product

Pengxiang Lan, Haoyu Xu, Enneng Yang, Yuliang Liang, Guibing Guo, Jianzhe Zhao, Xingwei Wang


Abstract
Prompt tuning (PT) offers a cost-effective alternative to fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), requiring only a few parameters in soft prompt tokens added before the input text. However, existing PT approaches face two significant issues: i They overlook intrinsic semantic associations between soft prompt tokens, leading to high discreteness and limited interactions, thus reducing the model’s comprehension and effectiveness in complex tasks. ii Due to the complexity of downstream tasks, long soft prompt is necessitated to improve performance, but prompt length correlates positively with memory usage and computational costs. Achieving high efficiency and performance remains an ongoing challenge. To address these issues, we propose a novel Low-parameters Prompt Tuning (LAMP) method, which leverages prompt decomposition and compressed outer product. Specifically, the prompt decomposition module employs Truncated SVD to reduce training parameters and significantly lower the dimensionality of the soft prompt parameter space. It then utilizes a compressed outer product module to facilitate multiple interactions among prompt tokens, exploring their intrinsic associations to enhance knowledge representation. Finally, LAMP uses average pooling to reduce memory usage and training/inference time. Extensive experiments across six architectures and eight datasets demonstrate that LAMP outperforms state-of-the-art PT-based and LoRA-based methods in performance and efficiency.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.225
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4406–4421
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-long.225/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pengxiang Lan, Haoyu Xu, Enneng Yang, Yuliang Liang, Guibing Guo, Jianzhe Zhao, and Xingwei Wang. 2025. Efficient and Effective Prompt Tuning via Prompt Decomposition and Compressed Outer Product. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4406–4421, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Efficient and Effective Prompt Tuning via Prompt Decomposition and Compressed Outer Product (Lan et al., NAACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-long.225.pdf