READ: Recurrent Adaptation of Large Transformers
Sid Wang John Nguyen Ke Li Carole-Jean Wu
Fine-tuning large-scale Transformers has led to the explosion of many AI
applications across Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision tasks.
However, fine-tuning all pre-trained model parameters becomes impractical as
the model size and number of tasks increase. Parameter-efficient transfer
learning (PETL) methods aim to address these challenges. While effective in
reducing the number of trainable parameters, PETL methods still require
significant energy and computational resources to fine-tune. In this paper, we
introduce \textbf{RE}current \textbf{AD}aption (READ) -- a lightweight and
memory-efficient fine-tuning method -- to overcome the limitations of the
current PETL approaches. Specifically, READ inserts a small RNN network
alongside the backbone model so that the model does not have to back-propagate
through the large backbone network. Through comprehensive empirical evaluation
of the GLUE benchmark, we demonstrate READ can achieve a $56\%$ reduction in
the training memory consumption and an $84\%$ reduction in the GPU energy usage
while retraining high model quality compared to full-tuning. Additionally, the
model size of READ does not grow with the backbone model size, making it a
highly scalable solution for fine-tuning large Transformers.