Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track
Tao Lei, Junwen Bai, Siddhartha Brahma, Joshua Ainslie, Kenton Lee, Yanqi Zhou, Nan Du, Vincent Zhao, Yuexin Wu, Bo Li, Yu Zhang, Ming-Wei Chang
We propose Conditional Adapter (CoDA), a parameter-efficient transfer learning method that also improves inference efficiency. CoDA generalizes beyond standard adapter approaches to enable a new way of balancing speed and accuracy using conditional computation.Starting with an existing dense pretrained model, CoDA adds sparse activation together with a small number of new parameters and a light-weight training phase.Our experiments demonstrate that the CoDA approach provides an unexpectedly efficient way to transfer knowledge.Across a variety of language, vision, and speech tasks, CoDA achieves a 2x to 8x inference speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art Adapter approaches with moderate to no accuracy loss and the same parameter efficiency.