PEFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Billion-Scale Models on Low-Resource Hardware
Motivation
Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the transformer architecture, like GPT, T5, and BERT have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also started foraying into other domains, such as Computer Vision (CV) (VIT, Stable Diffusion, LayoutLM) and Audio (Whisper, XLS-R). The conventional paradigm is large-scale pretraining on generic web-scale data, followed by fine-tuning to downstream tasks. Fine-tuning these pretrained LLMs on downstream datasets results in huge performance gains when compared to using the pretrained LLMs out-of-the-box (zero-shot inference, for example).
However, as models get larger and larger, full fine-tuning becomes infeasible to train on consumer hardware. In addition, storing and deploying fine-tuned models independently for each downstream task becomes very expensive, because fine-tuned models are the same size as the original pretrained model. Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches are meant to address both problems!
Motivation
Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the transformer architecture, like GPT, T5, and BERT have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also started foraying into other domains, such as Computer Vision (CV) (VIT, Stable Diffusion, LayoutLM) and Audio (Whisper, XLS-R). The conventional paradigm is large-scale pretraining on generic web-scale data, followed by fine-tuning to downstream tasks. Fine-tuning these pretrained LLMs on downstream datasets results in huge performance gains when compared to using the pretrained LLMs out-of-the-box (zero-shot inference, for example).
However, as models get larger and larger, full fine-tuning becomes infeasible to train on consumer hardware. In addition, storing and deploying fine-tuned models independently for each downstream task becomes very expensive, because fine-tuned models are the same size as the original pretrained model. Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches are meant to address both problems!