CombLM: Adapting Black-Box Language Models through Small Fine-Tuned
  Models
Aitor Ormazabal Mikel Artetxe Eneko Agirre
Methods for adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks and domains have
traditionally assumed white-box access to the model, and work by modifying its
parameters. However, this is incompatible with a recent trend in the field,
where the highest quality models are only available as black-boxes through
inference APIs. Even when the model weights are available, the computational
cost of fine-tuning large LMs can be prohibitive for most practitioners. In
this work, we present a lightweight method for adapting large LMs to new
domains and tasks, assuming no access to their weights or intermediate
activations. Our approach fine-tunes a small white-box LM and combines it with
the large black-box LM at the probability level through a small network,
learned on a small validation set. We validate our approach by adapting a large
LM (OPT-30B) to several domains and a downstream task (machine translation),
observing improved performance in all cases, of up to 9%, while using a domain
expert 23x smaller.