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Main Authors: Wistuba, Martin, Sivaprasad, Prabhu Teja, Balles, Lukas, Zappella, Giovanni
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03216
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author Wistuba, Martin
Sivaprasad, Prabhu Teja
Balles, Lukas
Zappella, Giovanni
author_facet Wistuba, Martin
Sivaprasad, Prabhu Teja
Balles, Lukas
Zappella, Giovanni
contents Recent Continual Learning (CL) methods have combined pretrained Transformers with prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) technique. We argue that the choice of prompt tuning in prior works was an undefended and unablated decision, which has been uncritically adopted by subsequent research, but warrants further research to understand its implications. In this paper, we conduct this research and find that the choice of prompt tuning as a PEFT method hurts the overall performance of the CL system. To illustrate this, we replace prompt tuning with LoRA in two state-of-the-art continual learning methods: Learning to Prompt and S-Prompts. These variants consistently achieve higher accuracy across a wide range of domain-incremental and class-incremental benchmarks, while being competitive in inference speed. Our work highlights a crucial argument: unexamined choices can hinder progress in the field, and rigorous ablations, such as the PEFT method, are required to drive meaningful adoption of CL techniques in real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_03216
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Choice of PEFT Technique in Continual Learning: Prompt Tuning is Not All You Need
Wistuba, Martin
Sivaprasad, Prabhu Teja
Balles, Lukas
Zappella, Giovanni
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent Continual Learning (CL) methods have combined pretrained Transformers with prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) technique. We argue that the choice of prompt tuning in prior works was an undefended and unablated decision, which has been uncritically adopted by subsequent research, but warrants further research to understand its implications. In this paper, we conduct this research and find that the choice of prompt tuning as a PEFT method hurts the overall performance of the CL system. To illustrate this, we replace prompt tuning with LoRA in two state-of-the-art continual learning methods: Learning to Prompt and S-Prompts. These variants consistently achieve higher accuracy across a wide range of domain-incremental and class-incremental benchmarks, while being competitive in inference speed. Our work highlights a crucial argument: unexamined choices can hinder progress in the field, and rigorous ablations, such as the PEFT method, are required to drive meaningful adoption of CL techniques in real-world applications.
title Choice of PEFT Technique in Continual Learning: Prompt Tuning is Not All You Need
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03216