Improving generalization in large language models by learning prefix
  subspaces
Louis Falissard Vincent Guigue Laure Soulier
This article focuses on large language models (LLMs) fine-tuning in the
scarce data regime (also known as the "few-shot" learning setting). We propose
a method to increase the generalization capabilities of LLMs based on neural
network subspaces. This optimization method, recently introduced in computer
vision, aims to improve model generalization by identifying wider local optima
through the joint optimization of an entire simplex of models in parameter
space. Its adaptation to massive, pretrained transformers, however, poses some
challenges. First, their considerable number of parameters makes it difficult
to train several models jointly, and second, their deterministic parameter
initialization schemes make them unfit for the subspace method as originally
proposed. We show in this paper that "Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning" (PEFT)
methods, however, are perfectly compatible with this original approach, and
propose to learn entire simplex of continuous prefixes. We test our method on a
variant of the GLUE benchmark adapted to the few-shot learning setting, and
show that both our contributions jointly lead to a gain in average performances
compared to sota methods. The implementation can be found at the following
link: https://github.com/Liloulou/prefix_subspace