PELA: Learning Parameter-Efficient Models with Low-Rank Approximation
Authors: Yangyang Guo, Guangzhi Wang, Mohan Kankanhalli

Applying a pre-trained large model to downstream tasks is prohibitive under resource-constrained conditions. Recent dominant approaches for addressing efficiency issues involve adding a few learnable parameters to the fixed backbone model. This strategy however leads to more challenges in loading large models for downstream fine-tuning with limited resources. In this paper we propose a novel method for increasing the parameter efficiency of pre-trained models by introducing an intermediate pre-training stage. To this end we first employ low-rank approximation to compress the original large model and then devise a feature distillation module and a weight perturbation regularization module. These modules are specifically designed to enhance the low-rank model. In particular we update only the low-rank model while freezing the backbone parameters during pre-training. This allows for direct and efficient utilization of the low-rank model for downstream fine-tuning tasks. The proposed method achieves both efficiencies in terms of required parameters and computation time while maintaining comparable results with minimal modifications to the backbone architecture. Specifically when applied to three vision-only and one vision-language Transformer models our approach often demonstrates a merely 0.6-point decrease in performance while reducing the original parameter size by 1/3 to 2/3.