Abstract
Parameter-efficient tuning aims at updating only a small subset of parameters when adapting a pretrained model to downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce PASTA, in which we only modify the special token representations (e.g., [SEP] and [CLS] in BERT) before the self-attention module at each layer in Transformer-based models. PASTA achieves comparable performance to fine-tuning in natural language understanding tasks including text classification and NER with up to only 0.029% of total parameters trained. Our work not only provides a simple yet effective way of parameter-efficient tuning, which has a wide range of practical applications when deploying finetuned models for multiple tasks, but also demonstrates the pivotal role of special tokens in pretrained language models.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.eacl-main.60
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Dubrovnik, Croatia
- Editors:
- Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 865–872
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.60
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.60
- Cite (ACL):
- Xiaocong Yang, James Y. Huang, Wenxuan Zhou, and Muhao Chen. 2023. Parameter-Efficient Tuning with Special Token Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 865–872, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Parameter-Efficient Tuning with Special Token Adaptation (Yang et al., EACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/2023.eacl-main.60.pdf