Joint Localization and Activation Editing for Low-Resource Fine-Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lai, Wen, Fraser, Alexander, Titov, Ivan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Lai, Wen
Fraser, Alexander
Titov, Ivan
author_facet Lai, Wen
Fraser, Alexander
Titov, Ivan
contents Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, are commonly used to adapt LLMs. However, the effectiveness of standard PEFT methods is limited in low-resource scenarios with only a few hundred examples. Recent advances in interpretability research have inspired the emergence of activation editing (or steering) techniques, which modify the activations of specific model components. Due to their extremely small parameter counts, these methods show promise for small datasets. However, their performance is highly dependent on identifying the correct modules to edit and often lacks stability across different datasets. In this paper, we propose Joint Localization and Activation Editing (JoLA), a method that jointly learns (1) which heads in the Transformer to edit (2) whether the intervention should be additive, multiplicative, or both and (3) the intervention parameters themselves - the vectors applied as additive offsets or multiplicative scalings to the head output. Through evaluations on three benchmarks spanning commonsense reasoning, natural language understanding, and natural language generation, we demonstrate that JoLA consistently outperforms existing methods. The code for the method is released at https://github.com/wenlai-lavine/jola.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_01179
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Joint Localization and Activation Editing for Low-Resource Fine-Tuning
Lai, Wen
Fraser, Alexander
Titov, Ivan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, are commonly used to adapt LLMs. However, the effectiveness of standard PEFT methods is limited in low-resource scenarios with only a few hundred examples. Recent advances in interpretability research have inspired the emergence of activation editing (or steering) techniques, which modify the activations of specific model components. Due to their extremely small parameter counts, these methods show promise for small datasets. However, their performance is highly dependent on identifying the correct modules to edit and often lacks stability across different datasets. In this paper, we propose Joint Localization and Activation Editing (JoLA), a method that jointly learns (1) which heads in the Transformer to edit (2) whether the intervention should be additive, multiplicative, or both and (3) the intervention parameters themselves - the vectors applied as additive offsets or multiplicative scalings to the head output. Through evaluations on three benchmarks spanning commonsense reasoning, natural language understanding, and natural language generation, we demonstrate that JoLA consistently outperforms existing methods. The code for the method is released at https://github.com/wenlai-lavine/jola.
title Joint Localization and Activation Editing for Low-Resource Fine-Tuning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01179