Black-box Prompt Tuning with Subspace Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zheng, Yuanhang, Tan, Zhixing, Li, Peng, Liu, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911919373287424
author Zheng, Yuanhang
Tan, Zhixing
Li, Peng
Liu, Yang
author_facet Zheng, Yuanhang
Tan, Zhixing
Li, Peng
Liu, Yang
contents Black-box prompt tuning employs derivative-free optimization algorithms to learn prompts within low-dimensional subspaces rather than back-propagating through the network of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies reveal that black-box prompt tuning lacks versatility across tasks and LLMs, which we believe is related to the suboptimal choice of subspaces. In this paper, we introduce Black-box prompt tuning with Subspace Learning (BSL) to enhance the versatility of black-box prompt tuning. Based on the assumption that nearly optimal prompts for similar tasks reside in a common subspace, we propose identifying such subspaces through meta-learning on a collection of similar source tasks. Consequently, for a target task that shares similarities with the source tasks, we expect that optimizing within the identified subspace can yield a prompt that performs well on the target task. Experimental results confirm that our BSL framework consistently achieves competitive performance across various downstream tasks and LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_03518
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Black-box Prompt Tuning with Subspace Learning
Zheng, Yuanhang
Tan, Zhixing
Li, Peng
Liu, Yang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Black-box prompt tuning employs derivative-free optimization algorithms to learn prompts within low-dimensional subspaces rather than back-propagating through the network of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies reveal that black-box prompt tuning lacks versatility across tasks and LLMs, which we believe is related to the suboptimal choice of subspaces. In this paper, we introduce Black-box prompt tuning with Subspace Learning (BSL) to enhance the versatility of black-box prompt tuning. Based on the assumption that nearly optimal prompts for similar tasks reside in a common subspace, we propose identifying such subspaces through meta-learning on a collection of similar source tasks. Consequently, for a target task that shares similarities with the source tasks, we expect that optimizing within the identified subspace can yield a prompt that performs well on the target task. Experimental results confirm that our BSL framework consistently achieves competitive performance across various downstream tasks and LLMs.
title Black-box Prompt Tuning with Subspace Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.03518