2024/10/03 by Minh Le, Le, Minh, Chàu Nguyen +9 · 5 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Language and cultural evolution #Linguistics and Cultural Studies #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Natural Language Processing Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.02200
openalex publication_date 2024/10/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Prompt-based techniques, such as prompt-tuning and prefix-tuning, have gained prominence for their efficiency in fine-tuning large pre-trained models. Despite their widespread adoption, the theoretical foundations of these methods remain limited. For instance, in prefix-tuning, we observe that a key factor in achieving performance parity with full fine-tuning lies in the reparameterization strategy. However, the theoretical principles underpinning the effectiveness of this approach have yet to be thoroughly examined. Our study demonstrates that reparameterization is not merely an engineering trick but is grounded in deep theoretical foundations. Specifically, we show that the reparameterization strategy implicitly encodes a shared structure between prefix key and value vectors. Building on recent insights into the connection between prefix-tuning and mixture of experts models, we further illustrate that this shared structure significantly improves sample efficiency in parameter estimation compared to non-shared alternatives. The effectiveness of prefix-tuning across diverse tasks is empirically confirmed to be enhanced by the shared structure, through extensive experiments in both visual and language domains. Additionally, we uncover similar structural benefits in prompt-tuning, offering new perspectives on its success. Our findings provide theoretical and empirical contributions, advancing the understanding of prompt-based methods and their underlying mechanisms.