Easy Adaptation: An Efficient Task-Specific Knowledge Injection Method for Large Models in Resource-Constrained Environments

Abstract

While the enormous parameter scale endows Large Models (LMs) with unparalleled performance, it also limits their adaptability across specific tasks. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a critical approach for effectively adapting LMs to a diverse range of downstream tasks. However, existing PEFT methods face two primary challenges: (1) High resource cost. Although PEFT methods significantly reduce resource demands compared to full fine-tuning, it still requires substantial time and memory, making it impractical in resource-constrained environments. (2) Parameter dependency. PEFT methods heavily rely on updating a subset of parameters associated with LMs to incorporate task-specific knowledge. Yet, due to increasing competition in the LMs landscape, many companies have adopted closed-source policies for their leading models, offering access only via Application Programming Interface (APIs). Whereas, the expense is often cost-prohibitive and difficult to sustain, as the fine-tuning process of LMs is extremely slow. Even if small models perform far worse than LMs in general, they can achieve superior results on particular distributions while requiring only minimal resources. Motivated by this insight, we propose Easy Adaptation (EA), which designs Specific Small Models (SSMs) to complement the underfitted data distribution for LMs. Extensive experiments show that EA matches the performance of PEFT on diverse tasks without accessing LM parameters, and requires only minimal resources.