3-in-1: 2D Rotary Adaptation for Efficient Finetuning, Efficient Batching and Composability

Parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) methods effectively adapt large language models (LLMs) to diverse downstream tasks, reducing storage and GPU memory demands. Despite these advantages, several applications pose new challenges to PEFT beyond mere parameter efficiency. One notable challenge involves the efficient deployment of LLMs equipped with multiple task- or user-specific adapters, particularly when different adapters are needed for distinct requests within the same batch. Another challenge is the interpretability of LLMs, which is crucial for understanding how LLMs function. Previous studies introduced various approaches to address different challenges. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, RoAd, which employs a straightforward 2D rotation to adapt LLMs and addresses all the above challenges: (1) RoAd is remarkably parameter-efficient, delivering optimal performance on GLUE, eight commonsense reasoning tasks and four arithmetic reasoning tasks with $<0.1\%$ trainable parameters; (2) RoAd facilitates the efficient serving of requests requiring different adapters within a batch, with an overhead comparable to element-wise multiplication instead of batch matrix multiplication; (3) RoAd enhances LLM's interpretability through integration within a framework of distributed interchange intervention, demonstrated via composition experiments.

Paper

Similar papers

Peer review

Reviewer iQCQ5/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-08

Summary

This paper proposes a 2D rotation adaptation method called RoAd for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). RoAd achieves parameter-efficient fine-tuning by rotating representations. Experimental results demonstrate that RoAd performs excellently across multiple benchmarks, reducing the number of training parameters and computational overhead.

Strengths

1 The method proposed in this paper is simple but efficient. 2 This method performs well on small-scale language models, achieving better performance with fewer or comparable parameters.

Weaknesses

1 The paper claims in the abstract that one of the main scenarios it addresses is multitasking. However, the authors mainly illustrate this through qualitative experiments in section 4.3, which seems unconvincing. It is suggested that the authors refer to ATTEMPT [ATTEMPT: Parameter-Efficient Multi-task Tuning via Attentional Mixtures of Soft Prompts] and compare it in the same scenario to fully demonstrate RoAd's advantages in multitask learning. 2 There is some confusion about the logical flow of the paper, especially in chapter 2. It seems that sections 2.2 and 2.3 are not closely related to section 2.1. 3 The method's improvement on large-scale language models is relatively limited. As shown in Table 3, RoAd2/4 performs the same as LoReFT when using more parameters. This needs to be explained. 4 It is suggested that the authors add a main diagram to describe the method. 5 Figure 3 Middle shows that as the generated tokens increase, RoAd's throughput decreases rapidly, while LoRA does not show this trend. Will RoAd's throughput be lower than LoRA's when generating longer texts? Furthermore, what are the respective parameter amounts for LoRA and RoAd here? 6 This paper seems to have similarities with SSF [Scaling & Shifting Your Features: A New Baseline for Efficient Model Tuning], as both methods fine-tune by adjusting output representations.

Questions

see Weaknesses.

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

In the Limitations section, the authors mentioned scalability and training parameters. Since the primary comparison in this paper is with LoRA, could the authors reduce LoRA's parameter count to the same level as the method proposed in this paper and then conduct the relevant comparative experiments?

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Thanks again for your positive feedback

Dear Reviewer iQCQ, We sincerely thank you for your positive feedback and the time you dedicated to reviewing our rebuttal. It brings us great joy to learn that our response has addressed your concerns and contributed to increasing the score from 4 to 5. As the score is still borderline, we are wondering if there are any major concerns regarding our current revision. It would be our great pleasure to provide further clarifications and results to address any additional doubts. Your suggestions really help a lot to improve our work and make the justification of our method more complete. Once again, we would like to express our appreciation for your valuable comments during the reviewing process. Best regards!

Reviewer zyNQ6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-09

Summary

This paper introduces a novel method for parameter-efficient finetuning, RoAd. By employing a straightforward 2D rotation to adapt LLMs, this paper addresses the challenges of existing parameter-efficient finetuning method for LLMs. Experiments on downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Strengths

1. This paper proposes a novel method for parameter-efficient finetuning which efficiently adapts LLMs using a minimal number of trainable parameters. 2. The method enhances both batching efficiency and composability. 3. Comprehensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark, eight commonsense reasoning tasks and four arithmetic reasoning tasks are conducted to show the efficacy of the method.

Weaknesses

1. In the results of Table 2, RoAd shows different performance on base and large model, what could be the reason? Why the RoAd(fc1) of large model with less parameters shows better average accuracy? Why the full FT setting shows even lower accuracy? 2. If the proposed RoAd maintains the same quantity of parameters of existing method like LoRA, could the accuracy be further improved? 3. How about the RoAd2 and RoAd4 on the held-out GLUE development set?

Questions

Please refer to the weaknesses.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

Yes.

Reviewer UyLU6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-24

Summary

This paper proposes a parameter-efficient finetuning method named RoAd, to address two challenges of current methods. The first challenge is the efficient deployment of LLMs equipped with multiple task- or user-specific adapters. The second one is the interpretability of LLMs. RoAd employs a straightforward 2D rotation to adapt LLMs. Experiment results consistently show that RoAd surpasses other PEFT methods

Strengths

- This paper motivates well on the two challenges of current PEFT methods. - RoAd achieves impressive results, surpasses other PEFT methods in various tasks. - The authors perform the insightful pilot study and make interesting observations on the key factor influencing the adaptation of LLMs.

Weaknesses

- Evaluation of efficiency results for batching could be improved. The proposal of RoAd is well motivated by the overhead of batch matrix multiplication in current methods [1, 54] (Page 2, line 36). However, the authors only compare with LoRA in the evaluation of throughput of batching. It would be better if the authors can compare with [54] in this evaluation. - Novelty and advantage over OFT [41] need clarification. As RoAd can be considered as a specialized case of OFT with w = 2 (Page 3, line 91), it is important to clarify the technical novelty of RoAd over OFT. In the current form of the paper, the reader may consider RoAd as a special case of OFT without much technical novelty over OFT. - RoAd fails to consistently outperform other PEFT methods on arithmetic reasoning tasks. Specifically, the results of RoAd on LLaMA-7B is worse than LoRA and AdapterP. Such results make the statement "consistently surpasses" in Page 2, line 53, seem like a bit of an overclaim.

Questions

- Page 7, line 247, "Figure 4" should be "Table 4".

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

4

Contribution

2

Limitations

Yes.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-14

Thank you for your feedback

Dear Reviewer UyLU, Thank you for your feedback. We really enjoy the discussion, and thanks again for your suggestions about: 1. Comparing RoAd to FLoRA for the batching efficiency; 2. Clear clarification of RoAd's novelty and advantages over OFT; 3. Typos and more accurate statement. We believe these suggestions make our work more solid and strong. Best!

Reviewer vHYZ6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-25

Summary

This paper proposes a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called RoAD, aimed at addressing the challenges of efficient deployment of LLMs that require multiple adapters for distinct needs and enhancing the interpretability of LLMs. The motivation behind this approach stems from the observation that the fine-tuning process primarily affects the angular components of representations rather than their magnitude. Thus, RoAD introduces a 2D rotational approach to representations to achieve parameter-efficient adaptation. Experimental results demonstrate that RoAD achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared to baseline approaches.

Strengths

- Developing effective approaches to adapt the LLM to downstream tasks with better scalability and performance is an important problem. The achieved performance of this paper looks promising to me. - The paper layout is clear and the writing is easy to understand. - The observation that during tuning, the directional change is much more significant than the magnitude change is an interesting observation and may further motivate some follow-up research.

Weaknesses

- For the observation section, it would be beneficial to include results from more recent autoregressive language models, such as Llama2, to ensure that the observation is consistent and generalizable across more commonly used models. - Another concern regarding the observation section is that the metrics used for magnitude and angular change are not identical. As a result, the claim that angular change is larger than magnitude change may be significantly influenced by the chosen metric and scaling. The authors should further justify the validity of this observation when using different metrics. - The authors should consider further benchmarking the proposed method on generative tasks with instruction tuning and evaluate it on more challenging benchmarks, such as Alpaca-Eval (https://github.com/tatsu-lab/alpaca_eval) and MT-Bench (https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat/tree/main/fastchat/llm_judge).

Questions

- Can the proposed method be applied to vision language models? Does the observation still stand for vision language models?

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors have mentioned the potential limitations of the paper.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Thank you for your raised score

Dear Reviewer vHYZ, We are very encouraged by your increased score. We really enjoy the discussion, and thank you for your suggestions about: 1. Observation from Llama2; 2. Further benchmarking RoAd with AlpacaEval and MT-Bench, and on visual instruction tasks. We believe these suggestions make our work more solid and strong. Best!

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-10

Kind reminder for your feedback

Dear Reviewers, Thanks again for the reviews! We deeply appreciate the time and effort you have invested in evaluating our work. We really value your reviews, and have carefully considered your comments and prepared a detailed rebuttal addressing each point raised. We are hoping you would be able to review our responses and to engage in a discussion before the end of the discussion period. Please let us know if there are any specific areas you'd like us to clarify further or discuss in more detail. Thank you once again for your commitment to the review process. Best regards,
 Authors

Reviewer vHYZ2024-08-12

I would like to thank the authors for their detailed responses and have raised my score accordingly.

Reviewer iQCQ2024-08-13

Thank you for your response. It addressed most of my concerns, and I am willing to increase my score.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Thank you for your increased score

Dear Reviewer iQCQ, We are very encouraged by your increased score. We really enjoy the discussion, and thank you for your suggestions about: 1. Adding quantative evaluation for RoAd's multitasking ability; 2. Adding an overview diagram; 3. Further evaluating RoAd's batching efficiency for sequence length > 4K; 4. Comparing RoAd to LoRA with the same level of trainable parameters. We believe these suggestions make our work more solid and strong. Best!

Reviewer UyLU2024-08-14

I would like to thank the authors for addressing my concerns. I will keep my original rating of weak accept. I agree that this is a technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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