Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning with Diff Pruning

Abstract

The large size of pretrained networks makes them difficult to deploy for multiple tasks in storage-constrained settings. Diff pruning enables parameter-efficient transfer learning that scales well with new tasks. The approach learns a task-specific “diff” vector that extends the original pretrained parameters. This diff vector is adaptively pruned during training with a differentiable approximation to the L0-norm penalty to encourage sparsity. As the number of tasks increases, diff pruning remains parameter-efficient, as it requires storing only a small diff vector for each task. Since it does not require access to all tasks during training, it is attractive in on-device deployment settings where tasks arrive in stream or even from different providers. Diff pruning can match the performance of finetuned baselines on the GLUE benchmark while only modifying 0.5% of the pretrained model’s parameters per task and scales favorably in comparison to popular pruning approaches.