Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Strangmann, Tobias, Purucker, Lennart, Franke, Jörg K. H., Rapant, Ivo, Ferreira, Fabio, Hutter, Frank
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01195
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929574387908608
author Strangmann, Tobias
Purucker, Lennart
Franke, Jörg K. H.
Rapant, Ivo
Ferreira, Fabio
Hutter, Frank
author_facet Strangmann, Tobias
Purucker, Lennart
Franke, Jörg K. H.
Rapant, Ivo
Ferreira, Fabio
Hutter, Frank
contents As the landscape of large language models expands, efficiently finetuning for specific tasks becomes increasingly crucial. At the same time, the landscape of parameter-efficient finetuning methods rapidly expands. Consequently, practitioners face a multitude of complex choices when searching for an optimal finetuning pipeline for large language models. To reduce the complexity for practitioners, we investigate transfer learning for finetuning large language models and aim to transfer knowledge about configurations from related finetuning tasks to a new task. In this work, we transfer learn finetuning by meta-learning performance and cost surrogate models for grey-box meta-optimization from a new meta-dataset. Counter-intuitively, we propose to rely only on transfer learning for new datasets. Thus, we do not use task-specific Bayesian optimization but prioritize knowledge transferred from related tasks over task-specific feedback. We evaluate our method on eight synthetic question-answer datasets and a meta-dataset consisting of 1,800 runs of finetuning Microsoft's Phi-3. Our transfer learning is superior to zero-shot, default finetuning, and meta-optimization baselines. Our results demonstrate the transferability of finetuning to adapt large language models more effectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_01195
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Transfer Learning for Finetuning Large Language Models
Strangmann, Tobias
Purucker, Lennart
Franke, Jörg K. H.
Rapant, Ivo
Ferreira, Fabio
Hutter, Frank
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
As the landscape of large language models expands, efficiently finetuning for specific tasks becomes increasingly crucial. At the same time, the landscape of parameter-efficient finetuning methods rapidly expands. Consequently, practitioners face a multitude of complex choices when searching for an optimal finetuning pipeline for large language models. To reduce the complexity for practitioners, we investigate transfer learning for finetuning large language models and aim to transfer knowledge about configurations from related finetuning tasks to a new task. In this work, we transfer learn finetuning by meta-learning performance and cost surrogate models for grey-box meta-optimization from a new meta-dataset. Counter-intuitively, we propose to rely only on transfer learning for new datasets. Thus, we do not use task-specific Bayesian optimization but prioritize knowledge transferred from related tasks over task-specific feedback. We evaluate our method on eight synthetic question-answer datasets and a meta-dataset consisting of 1,800 runs of finetuning Microsoft's Phi-3. Our transfer learning is superior to zero-shot, default finetuning, and meta-optimization baselines. Our results demonstrate the transferability of finetuning to adapt large language models more effectively.
title Transfer Learning for Finetuning Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01195