TADA: Efficient Task-Agnostic Domain Adaptation for Transformers
Chia-Chien Hung Lukas Lange Jannik Strötgen
Intermediate training of pre-trained transformer-based language models on
domain-specific data leads to substantial gains for downstream tasks. To
increase efficiency and prevent catastrophic forgetting alleviated from full
domain-adaptive pre-training, approaches such as adapters have been developed.
However, these require additional parameters for each layer, and are criticized
for their limited expressiveness. In this work, we introduce TADA, a novel
task-agnostic domain adaptation method which is modular, parameter-efficient,
and thus, data-efficient. Within TADA, we retrain the embeddings to learn
domain-aware input representations and tokenizers for the transformer encoder,
while freezing all other parameters of the model. Then, task-specific
fine-tuning is performed. We further conduct experiments with meta-embeddings
and newly introduced meta-tokenizers, resulting in one model per task in
multi-domain use cases. Our broad evaluation in 4 downstream tasks for 14
domains across single- and multi-domain setups and high- and low-resource
scenarios reveals that TADA is an effective and efficient alternative to full
domain-adaptive pre-training and adapters for domain adaptation, while not
introducing additional parameters or complex training steps.