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Related papers: When Do Prompting and Prefix-Tuning Work? A Theory…

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Prompting is one of the main ways to adapt a pretrained model to target tasks. Besides manually constructing prompts, many prompt optimization methods have been proposed in the literature. Method development is mainly empirically driven,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Tim Genewein , Li Kevin Wenliang , Jordi Grau-Moya , Anian Ruoss , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter

Fine-tuning is the de facto way to leverage large pretrained language models to perform downstream tasks. However, it modifies all the language model parameters and therefore necessitates storing a full copy for each task. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Xiang Lisa Li , Percy Liang

Prefix-tuning, or more generally continuous prompt tuning, has become an essential paradigm of parameter-efficient transfer learning. Using a large pre-trained language model (PLM), prefix-tuning can obtain strong performance by training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Yifan Chen , Devamanyu Hazarika , Mahdi Namazifar , Yang Liu , Di Jin , Dilek Hakkani-Tur

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Minh Le , Chau Nguyen , Huy Nguyen , Quyen Tran , Trung Le , Nhat Ho

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Samet Oymak , Ankit Singh Rawat , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Christos Thrampoulidis

Despite the widespread adoption of prompting, prompt tuning and prefix-tuning of transformer models, our theoretical understanding of these fine-tuning methods remains limited. A key question is whether one can arbitrarily modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Aleksandar Petrov , Philip H. S. Torr , Adel Bibi

In computer vision, fine-tuning is the de-facto approach to leverage pre-trained vision models to perform downstream tasks. However, deploying it in practice is quite challenging, due to adopting parameter inefficient global update and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Xing Nie , Bolin Ni , Jianlong Chang , Gaomeng Meng , Chunlei Huo , Zhaoxiang Zhang , Shiming Xiang , Qi Tian , Chunhong Pan

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have become crucial for rapidly adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. Prefix-Tuning, an early and effective PEFT technique, demonstrated the ability to achieve performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Haonan Wang , Brian Chen , Siquan Li , Xinhe Liang , Hwee Kuan Lee , Kenji Kawaguchi , Tianyang Hu

Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs) have had exceptional success in language generation. To leverage the rich knowledge encoded by PLMs, a simple yet powerful paradigm is to use prompts in the form of either discrete tokens or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Tianyi Tang , Junyi Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Parameter-efficient tuning aims to mitigate the large memory requirements of adapting pretrained language models for downstream tasks. For example, one popular method, prefix-tuning, prepends trainable tokens to sequences while freezing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Jonathan Li , Will Aitken , Rohan Bhambhoria , Xiaodan Zhu

Pre-trained models have been shown effective in many code intelligence tasks. These models are pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus and then fine-tuned in downstream tasks. However, as the inputs to pre-training and downstream tasks…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Chaozheng Wang , Yuanhang Yang , Cuiyun Gao , Yun Peng , Hongyu Zhang , Michael R. Lyu

In this work, we explore "prompt tuning", a simple yet effective mechanism for learning "soft prompts" to condition frozen language models to perform specific downstream tasks. Unlike the discrete text prompts used by GPT-3, soft prompts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Brian Lester , Rami Al-Rfou , Noah Constant

In prompt tuning, a prefix or suffix text is added to the prompt, and the embeddings (soft prompts) or token indices (hard prompts) of the prefix/suffix are optimized to gain more control over language models for specific tasks. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Shouchang Guo , Sonam Damani , Keng-hao Chang

We introduce Context Tuning, a simple and effective method to significantly enhance few-shot adaptation of language models (LLMs) without fine-tuning model parameters. While prompt-based adaptation techniques have demonstrated the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Jack Lu , Ryan Teehan , Zhenbang Yang , Mengye Ren

When adapting large language models (LLMs) to a specific downstream task, two primary approaches are commonly employed: (1) prompt engineering, often with in-context few-shot learning, leveraging the model's inherent generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Jorg Bornschein , Clare Lyle , Yazhe Li , Amal Rannen-Triki , Xu Owen He , Razvan Pascanu

The large language models have achieved superior performance on various natural language tasks. One major drawback of such approaches is they are resource-intensive in fine-tuning new datasets. Soft-prompt tuning presents a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Guoxin Chen , Yiming Qian , Bowen Wang , Liangzhi Li

Current efficient fine-tuning methods (e.g., adapters, prefix-tuning, etc.) have optimized conditional text generation via training a small set of extra parameters of the neural language model, while freezing the rest for efficiency. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Marjan Ghazvininejad , Vladimir Karpukhin , Vera Gor , Asli Celikyilmaz

Prompt tuning has become a new paradigm for model tuning and it has demonstrated success in natural language pretraining and even vision pretraining. In this work, we explore the transfer of prompt tuning to multimodal pretraining, with a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Hao Yang , Junyang Lin , An Yang , Peng Wang , Chang Zhou , Hongxia Yang

It has been demonstrated that the art of prompt tuning is highly effective in efficiently extracting knowledge from pretrained foundation models, encompassing pretrained language models (PLMs), vision pretrained models, and vision-language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Xianjun Yang , Wei Cheng , Xujiang Zhao , Wenchao Yu , Linda Petzold , Haifeng Chen

Prompt-Tuning is an efficient method for adapting pre-trained language models to new tasks with minimal computational overhead by modifying prompt embeddings. In this work, we investigate how crucial the phenomenon of embedding collapse,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Sergey Sedov , Sumanth Bharadwaj Hachalli Karanam , Venu Gopal Kadamba
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