Small Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fine-tuned as Large Models via Over-Parameterization

AbstractBy scaling the model size, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks, mostly outperforming small PLMs by a large margin. However, due to the high computational cost, the huge number of parameters also restricts the applicability of large PLMs in real-world systems. In this paper, we focus on scaling up the parameters of PLMs only during fine-tuning, to benefit from the over-parameterization, while without increasing the inference latency. Given a relatively small PLM, we over-parameterize it by employing a matrix product operator, an efficient and almost lossless decomposition method to factorize its contained parameter matrices into a set of higher-dimensional tensors. Considering the efficiency, we further propose both static and dynamic strategies to select the most important parameter matrices for over-parameterization. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our approach can significantly boost the fine-tuning performance of small PLMs and even help small PLMs outperform 3× parameterized larger ones.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zfgao66/OPF.