MPrompt: Exploring Multi-level Prompt Tuning for Machine Reading Comprehension

Abstract

The large language models have achieved superior performance on various natural language tasks. One major drawback of such approaches is they are resource-intensive in fine-tuning new datasets. Soft-prompt tuning presents a resource-efficient solution to fine-tune the pre-trained language models (PLMs) while keeping their weight frozen. Existing soft prompt methods mainly focus on designing the input-independent prompts that steer the model to fit the domain of the new dataset. Those methods often ignore the fine-grained information about the task and context of the text. In this paper, we propose a multi-level prompt tuning (MPrompt) method for machine reading comprehension. It utilizes prompts at task-specific, domain-specific, and context-specific levels to enhance the comprehension of input semantics at different granularities. We also propose an independence constraint to steer each domain-specific prompt to focus on information within its domain to avoid redundancy. Moreover, we present a prompt generator that incorporates context-related knowledge in the prompt generation to enhance contextual relevancy. We conducted extensive experiments on 12 benchmarks of various QA formats and achieved an average improvement of 1.94\% over the state-of-the-art methods.