AdapterDrop: On the Efficiency of Adapters in Transformers

Andreas Rücklé, Gregor Geigle, Max Glockner, Tilman Beck, Jonas Pfeiffer, Nils Reimers, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
Transformer models are expensive to fine-tune, slow for inference, and have large storage requirements. Recent approaches tackle these shortcomings by training smaller models, dynamically reducing the model size, and by training light-weight adapters. In this paper, we propose AdapterDrop, removing adapters from lower transformer layers during training and inference, which incorporates concepts from all three directions. We show that AdapterDrop can dynamically reduce the computational overhead when performing inference over multiple tasks simultaneously, with minimal decrease in task performances. We further prune adapters from AdapterFusion, which improves the inference efficiency while maintaining the task performances entirely.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.626
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7930–7946
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.626
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.626
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andreas Rücklé, Gregor Geigle, Max Glockner, Tilman Beck, Jonas Pfeiffer, Nils Reimers, and Iryna Gurevych. 2021. AdapterDrop: On the Efficiency of Adapters in Transformers. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7930–7946, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AdapterDrop: On the Efficiency of Adapters in Transformers (Rücklé et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.626.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.626.mp4
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