GRASP: GRouped Activation Shared Parameterization for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and Robust Inference of Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bal, Malyaban, Sengupta, Abhronil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909978526220288
author Bal, Malyaban
Sengupta, Abhronil
author_facet Bal, Malyaban
Sengupta, Abhronil
contents Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) provides a scalable alternative to full-model adaptation by updating only a small subset of parameters in large pre-trained models. We introduce GRASP - GRouped Activation Shared Parameterization - a lightweight PEFT framework that partitions the D-dimensional token representations of selected layers into K << D groups and learns a shared scaling and shifting vector for each group. This grouped modulation reduces the number of trainable parameters significantly while preserving the ability of the model to learn task-specific features. Building on this formulation, we further propose StochGRASP, which learns Gaussian distributions as perturbations to the pre-trained weights rather than deterministic values. This probabilistic parameterization along with a noise-aware loss function formulation enables modelling hardware-level variability in programmed weights and significantly improves robustness under non-ideal inference conditions-an important requirement for deployment on edge-based emerging AI hardware. Across GLUE (RoBERTa-base & RoBERTa-large) and E2E NLG (GPT-2 Medium), GRASP matches or exceeds the performance of established PEFT methods while achieving an order of magnitude reduction in trainable parameters compared to LoRA and BitFit. Under varying levels of noise, StochGRASP consistently outperforms deterministic variants, demonstrating its suitability for energy-efficient and noise-prone hardware platforms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_04296
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GRASP: GRouped Activation Shared Parameterization for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and Robust Inference of Transformers
Bal, Malyaban
Sengupta, Abhronil
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) provides a scalable alternative to full-model adaptation by updating only a small subset of parameters in large pre-trained models. We introduce GRASP - GRouped Activation Shared Parameterization - a lightweight PEFT framework that partitions the D-dimensional token representations of selected layers into K << D groups and learns a shared scaling and shifting vector for each group. This grouped modulation reduces the number of trainable parameters significantly while preserving the ability of the model to learn task-specific features. Building on this formulation, we further propose StochGRASP, which learns Gaussian distributions as perturbations to the pre-trained weights rather than deterministic values. This probabilistic parameterization along with a noise-aware loss function formulation enables modelling hardware-level variability in programmed weights and significantly improves robustness under non-ideal inference conditions-an important requirement for deployment on edge-based emerging AI hardware. Across GLUE (RoBERTa-base & RoBERTa-large) and E2E NLG (GPT-2 Medium), GRASP matches or exceeds the performance of established PEFT methods while achieving an order of magnitude reduction in trainable parameters compared to LoRA and BitFit. Under varying levels of noise, StochGRASP consistently outperforms deterministic variants, demonstrating its suitability for energy-efficient and noise-prone hardware platforms.
title GRASP: GRouped Activation Shared Parameterization for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and Robust Inference of Transformers
topic Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04296