Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Cen-Jhih, Bhaskara, Aditya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11439
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909704194621440
author Li, Cen-Jhih
Bhaskara, Aditya
author_facet Li, Cen-Jhih
Bhaskara, Aditya
contents Fine-tuning is an important step in adapting foundation models such as large language models to downstream tasks. To make this step more accessible to users with limited computational budgets, it is crucial to develop fine-tuning methods that are memory and computationally efficient. Sparse Fine-tuning (SpFT) and Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) are two frameworks that have emerged for addressing this problem and have been adopted widely in practice. In this work, we develop a new SpFT framework, based on ideas from neural network pruning. At a high level, we first identify ``important'' neurons/nodes using feature importance metrics from network pruning (specifically, we use the structural pruning method), and then perform fine-tuning by restricting to weights involving these neurons. Experiments on common language tasks show our method improves SpFT's memory efficiency by 20-50\% while matching the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods like LoRA's variants.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11439
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Efficient Sparse Fine-Tuning with Low Quantization Error via Neural Network Pruning
Li, Cen-Jhih
Bhaskara, Aditya
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Fine-tuning is an important step in adapting foundation models such as large language models to downstream tasks. To make this step more accessible to users with limited computational budgets, it is crucial to develop fine-tuning methods that are memory and computationally efficient. Sparse Fine-tuning (SpFT) and Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) are two frameworks that have emerged for addressing this problem and have been adopted widely in practice. In this work, we develop a new SpFT framework, based on ideas from neural network pruning. At a high level, we first identify ``important'' neurons/nodes using feature importance metrics from network pruning (specifically, we use the structural pruning method), and then perform fine-tuning by restricting to weights involving these neurons. Experiments on common language tasks show our method improves SpFT's memory efficiency by 20-50\% while matching the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods like LoRA's variants.
title An Efficient Sparse Fine-Tuning with Low Quantization Error via Neural Network Pruning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11439