Selection-p: Self-Supervised Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression for Faithfulness and Transferability

Tsz Ting Chung, Leyang Cui, Lemao Liu, Xinting Huang, Shuming Shi, Dit-Yan Yeung


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of natural language processing tasks when leveraging in-context learning. To mitigate the additional computational and financial costs associated with in-context learning, several prompt compression methods have been proposed to compress the in-context learning prompts. Despite their success, these methods face challenges with transferability due to model-specific compression, or rely on external training data, such as GPT-4. In this paper, we investigate the ability of LLMs to develop a unified compression method that discretizes uninformative tokens, utilizing a self-supervised pre-training technique. By introducing a small number of parameters during the continual pre-training, the proposed Selection-p produces a probability for each input token, indicating whether to preserve or discard it. Experiments show Selection-p achieves state-of-the-art performance across numerous classification tasks, achieving compression rates of up to 10 times while experiencing only a marginal 0.8% decrease in performance. Moreover, it exhibits superior transferability to different models compared to prior work. Additionally, we further analyze how Selection-p helps maintain performance on in-context learning with long contexts.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.646
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11057–11070
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-emnlp.646/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.646
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tsz Ting Chung, Leyang Cui, Lemao Liu, Xinting Huang, Shuming Shi, and Dit-Yan Yeung. 2024. Selection-p: Self-Supervised Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression for Faithfulness and Transferability. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11057–11070, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Selection-p: Self-Supervised Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression for Faithfulness and Transferability (Chung et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-emnlp.646.pdf