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ReFT: Representation Finetuning for Language Models (arxiv.org)
3 points by kmdupree on Apr 5, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of adjusting a model's weights, this keeps the model frozen and learns small edits to its internal hidden states to teach it a new task. It needs 15x to 65x fewer learned values than the popular weight-tuning trick and usually works better.

Abstract

Parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) methods seek to adapt large neural models via updates to a small number of weights. However, much prior interpretability work has shown that representations encode rich semantic information, suggesting that editing representations might be a more powerful alternative. We pursue this hypothesis by developing a family of Representation Finetuning (ReFT) methods. ReFT methods operate on a frozen base model and learn task-specific interventions on hidden representations. We define a strong instance of the ReFT family, Low-rank Linear Subspace ReFT (LoReFT), and we identify an ablation of this method that trades some performance for increased efficiency. Both are drop-in replacements for existing PEFTs and learn interventions that are 15x--65x more parameter-efficient than LoRA. We showcase LoReFT on eight commonsense reasoning tasks, four arithmetic reasoning tasks, instruction-tuning, and GLUE. In all these evaluations, our ReFTs deliver the best balance of efficiency and performance, and almost always outperform state-of-the-art PEFTs. We release a generic ReFT training library publicly at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/pyreft.

Zhengxuan Wu, Aryaman Arora, Zheng Wang, Atticus Geiger, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher D. Manning, Christopher Potts
arXiv:2404.03592 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Apr 4, 2024 · updated May 22, 2024
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