Make Prompt-based Black-Box Tuning Colorful: Boosting Model Generalization from Three Orthogonal Perspectives
Qiushi Sun, Chengcheng Han, Nuo Chen, Renyu Zhu, Jingyang Gong, Xiang Li, Ming Gao
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing power on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, tuning these models for downstream tasks usually needs exorbitant costs or is unavailable due to commercial considerations. Recently, black-box tuning has been proposed to address this problem by optimizing task-specific prompts without accessing the gradients and hidden representations. However, most existing works have yet fully exploited the potential of gradient-free optimization under the scenario of few-shot learning. In this paper, we describe BBT-RGB, a suite of straightforward and complementary techniques for enhancing the efficiency and performance of black-box optimization. Specifically, our method includes three plug-and-play components: (1) Two-stage derivative-free optimization strategy that facilitates fast convergence and mitigates overfitting; (2) Automatic verbalizer construction with its novel usage under few-shot settings; (3) Better prompt initialization policy based on instruction search and auto-selected demonstration. Extensive experiments across various tasks on natural language understanding and inference demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our codes are available at https://github.com/QiushiSun/BBT-RGB.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.956
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 10958–10969
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.956
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Qiushi Sun, Chengcheng Han, Nuo Chen, Renyu Zhu, Jingyang Gong, Xiang Li, and Ming Gao. 2024. Make Prompt-based Black-Box Tuning Colorful: Boosting Model Generalization from Three Orthogonal Perspectives. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 10958–10969, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Make Prompt-based Black-Box Tuning Colorful: Boosting Model Generalization from Three Orthogonal Perspectives (Sun et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.956.pdf