Less is More: Parameter-Efficient Selection of Intermediate Tasks for Transfer Learning

Intermediate task transfer learning can greatly improve model performance. If, for example, one has little training data for emotion detection, first fine-tuning a language model on a sentiment classification dataset may improve performance strongly. But which task to choose for transfer learning? P...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2024-10
Main Authors: Schulte, David, Hamborg, Felix, Akbik, Alan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Emotion recognition
Machine learning
Neural networks
Performance enhancement
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Intermediate task transfer learning can greatly improve model performance. If, for example, one has little training data for emotion detection, first fine-tuning a language model on a sentiment classification dataset may improve performance strongly. But which task to choose for transfer learning? Prior methods producing useful task rankings are infeasible for large source pools, as they require forward passes through all source language models. We overcome this by introducing Embedding Space Maps (ESMs), light-weight neural networks that approximate the effect of fine-tuning a language model. We conduct the largest study on NLP task transferability and task selection with 12k source-target pairs. We find that applying ESMs on a prior method reduces execution time and disk space usage by factors of 10 and 278, respectively, while retaining high selection performance (avg. regret@5 score of 2.95).
ISSN:2331-8422