Towards Optimal Adapter Placement for Efficient Transfer Learning

Abstract: Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) aims to adapt pre-trained models to new downstream tasks while minimizing the number of fine-tuned parameters. Adapters, a popular approach in PETL, inject additional capacity into existing networks by incorporating low-rank projections, achieving performance comparable to full fine-tuning with significantly fewer parameters. This paper investigates the relationship between the placement of an adapter and its performance. We observe that adapter location within a network significantly impacts its effectiveness, and that the optimal placement is task-dependent. To exploit this observation, we introduce an extended search space of adapter connections, including long-range and recurrent adapters. We demonstrate that even randomly selected adapter placements from this expanded space yield improved results, and that high-performing placements often correlate with high gradient rank. Our findings reveal that a small number of strategically placed adapters can match or exceed the performance of the common baseline of adding adapters in every block, opening a new avenue for research into optimal adapter placement strategies.