PEFT means adding small trainable modules while keeping the base LLM frozen. The base weights are never updated together with the adapter.

Four adapter families in LLM-Adapters

  • series or bottleneck adapters
  • parallel adapters
  • prompt-based learning
  • reparameterisation methods such as LoRA

Findings from LLM-Adapters

  • adapter type and placement are empirical choices across reasoning tasks, and cannot be settled by theory alone
  • parallel adapters on the MLP path outperformed the others at a similar budget
  • at 7B scale, adapter PEFT with few extra parameters can match or beat full fine-tuning on in-distribution tasks
  • LLaMA-13B with a parallel adapter beat ChatGPT on 8 commonsense benchmarks

The reparameterisation family is covered in Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA).