Gradient-based Parameter Selection for Efficient Fine-Tuning
Authors: Zhi Zhang, Qizhe Zhang, Zijun Gao, Renrui Zhang, Ekaterina Shutova, Shiji Zhou, Shanghang Zhang

With the growing size of pre-trained models full fine-tuning and storing all the parameters for various downstream tasks is costly and infeasible. In this paper we propose a new parameter-efficient fine-tuning method Gradient-based Parameter Selection (GPS) demonstrating that only tuning a few selected parameters from the pre-trained model while keeping the remainder of the model frozen can generate similar or better performance compared with the full model fine-tuning method. Different from the existing popular and state-of-the-art parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches our method does not introduce any additional parameters and computational costs during both the training and inference stages. Another advantage is the model-agnostic and non-destructive property which eliminates the need for any other design specific to a particular model. Compared with the full fine-tuning GPS achieves 3.33% (91.78% vs. 88.45% FGVC) and 9.61% (73.1% vs. 65.57% VTAB) improvement of the accuracy with tuning only 0.36% parameters of the pre-trained model on average over 24 image classification tasks; it also demonstrates a significant improvement of 17% and 16.8% in mDice and mIoU respectively on medical image segmentation task. Moreover GPS achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing PEFT methods. The code will be available in https://github.com/FightingFighting/GPS.git.