Investigating the Effectiveness of HyperTuning via Gisting
Jason Phang
Gisting (Mu et al., 2023) is a simple method for training models to compress
information into fewer token representations using a modified attention mask,
and can serve as an economical approach to training Transformer-based
hypernetworks. We introduce HyperLlama, a set of Gisting-based hypernetworks
built on Llama-2 models that generates task-specific soft prefixes based on
few-shot inputs. In experiments across P3, Super-NaturalInstructions and Symbol
Tuning datasets, we show that HyperLlama models can effectively compress
information from few-shot examples into soft prefixes. However, they still
underperform multi-task fine-tuned language models with full attention over
few-shot in-context examples. We also show that HyperLlama-generated soft
prefixes can serve as better initializations for further prefix tuning.
Overall, Gisting-based hypernetworks are economical and easy to implement, but
have mixed empirical performance.