SPC: Soft Prompt Construction for Cross Domain Generalization

Wenbo Zhao, Arpit Gupta, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang

The 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP 2023) N/a Paper

TLDR: Recent advances in prompt tuning have proven effective as a new language modeling paradigm for various natural language understanding tasks. However, it is challenging to adapt the soft prompt embeddings to different domains or generalize to low-data settings when learning soft prompts itself is uns
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Abstract: Recent advances in prompt tuning have proven effective as a new language modeling paradigm for various natural language understanding tasks. However, it is challenging to adapt the soft prompt embeddings to different domains or generalize to low-data settings when learning soft prompts itself is unstable, task-specific, and bias-prone. This paper proposes a principled learning framework---soft prompt construction (SPC)---to facilitate learning domain-adaptable soft prompts. Derived from the SPC framework is a simple loss that can plug into various models and tuning approaches to improve their cross-domain performance. We show SPC can improve upon SOTA for contextual query rewriting, summarization, and paraphrase detection by up to 5\%, 19\%, and 16\%, respectively.