Multitask Prompt Tuning Enables Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Prompt tuning, in which a base pretrained model is adapted to each task via conditioning on learned prompt vectors, has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models to multiple downstream tasks. However, existing methods typically learn soft prompt vectors from scratch, and it has not been clear how to exploit the rich cross-task knowledge with prompt vectors in a multitask learning setting. We propose multitask prompt tuning (MPT), which first learns a single transferable prompt by distilling knowledge from multiple task-specific source prompts. We then learn multiplicative low rank updates to this shared prompt to efficiently adapt it to each downstream target task. Extensive experiments on 23 NLP datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, including the full finetuning baseline in some cases, despite only tuning 0.035% as many task-specific parameters.
Key facts. Cited by 115 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 72 of its 92 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2023.
Builds on
72 of 92 references.
References · 72
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
- 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
- 2015Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Networkcited by 10,324
- 2018GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understandingcited by 4,899
- 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,886
- 2019DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lightercited by 4,307
- 2019Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLPcited by 4,236
- 2016SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Textcited by 4,148
- 2021Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generationcited by 3,915
- 2021The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuningcited by 3,795
- 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,780
38 more
- 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,754
- 2017A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inferencecited by 2,682
- 2015Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classificationcited by 2,330
- 2021Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processingcited by 2,234
- 2019BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questionscited by 2,183
- 2018Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answeringcited by 2,164
- 2018CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledgecited by 1,822
- 2019SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systemscited by 1,729
- 2020Knowledge Distillation: A Surveycited by 1,603
- 2021Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalizationcited by 1,470
- 2020Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learnerscited by 1,256
- 2021BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-modelscited by 1,245
- 2019TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understandingcited by 1,167
- 2017SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluationcited by 1,001
- 2018Neural Network Acceptability Judgmentscited by 958
- 2020Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inferencecited by 938
- 2022Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learningcited by 896
- 2017A Survey on Multi-Task Learningcited by 840
- 2019Adversarial NLI: A New Benchmark for Natural Language Understandingcited by 807
- 2017An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networkscited by 803
- 2021P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Taskscited by 689
- 2020Intrinsic Dimensionality Explains the Effectiveness of Language Model Fine-Tuningcited by 671
- 2020It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learnerscited by 669
- 2018Born Again Neural Networkscited by 546
- 2016Cross-stitch Networks for Multi-task Learningcited by 467
- 2021Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layerscited by 460
- 2019PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scramblingcited by 402
- 2018WiC: the Word-in-Context Dataset for Evaluating Context-Sensitive Meaning Representationscited by 372
- 2020BatchEnsemble: An Alternative Approach to Efficient Ensemble and Lifelong Learningcited by 371
- 2018Measuring the Intrinsic Dimension of Objective Landscapescited by 370
- 2020Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning with Diff Pruningcited by 352
- 2016NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Datasetcited by 331
- 2021Parameter-efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning for Transformers via Shared Hypernetworkscited by 284
- 2017The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generationcited by 253
- 2021SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfercited by 235
- 2022LST: Ladder Side-Tuning for Parameter and Memory Efficient Transfer Learningcited by 230
- 2017SearchQA: A New Q&A Dataset Augmented with Context from a Search Enginecited by 225
- 2021Training Neural Networks with Fixed Sparse Maskscited by 214
50 most cited of 72 All 72 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 27; 2024: 41; 2025: 34; 2026: 13.
115 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 303
- 2024PiSSA: Principal Singular Values and Singular Vectors Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 269
- 2023ToolkenGPT: Augmenting Frozen Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Embeddingscited by 240
- 2023PromptAgent: Strategic Planning with Language Models Enables Expert-level Prompt Optimizationcited by 233
- 2023Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Pretrained Language Models: A Critical Review and Assessmentcited by 230
- 2023Efficient Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 186
- 2024MixLoRA: Enhancing Large Language Models Fine-Tuning with LoRA-based Mixture of Expertscited by 147
- 2023The Troubling Emergence of Hallucination in Large Language Models -- An Extensive Definition, Quantification, and Prescriptive Remediationscited by 131
- 2023PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restorationcited by 114
- 2023EfficientDM: Efficient Quantization-Aware Fine-Tuning of Low-Bit Diffusion Modelscited by 78
- 2023Learning from models beyond fine-tuningcited by 48
- 2023LLaFS: When Large Language Models Meet Few-Shot Segmentationcited by 48
38 more
- 2024Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Large Models: A Survey of Methodologiescited by 47
- 2023When Do Prompting and Prefix-Tuning Work? A Theory of Capabilities and Limitationscited by 43
- 2024Do Large Language Models Have Compositional Ability? An Investigation into Limitations and Scalabilitycited by 40
- 2024Advancing Parameter Efficiency in Fine-tuning via Representation Editingcited by 37
- 2023DePT: Decomposed Prompt Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuningcited by 35
- 2024AI Safety in Generative AI Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 33
- 2023MultiLoRA: Democratizing LoRA for Better Multi-Task Learningcited by 32
- 2024Facing the Elephant in the Room: Visual Prompt Tuning or Full Finetuning?cited by 31
- 2024Towards Few-Shot Adaptation of Foundation Models via Multitask Finetuningcited by 31
- 2024Out-of-distribution generalization via composition: a lens through induction heads in Transformerscited by 28
- 2023G-Adapter: Towards Structure-Aware Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Graph Transformer Networkscited by 25
- 2024Astraios: Parameter-Efficient Instruction Tuning Code Large Language Modelscited by 23
- 2025GSQ-Tuning: Group-Shared Exponents Integer in Fully Quantized Training for LLMs On-Device Fine-tuningcited by 21
- 2023Non-Intrusive Adaptation: Input-Centric Parameter-efficient Fine-Tuning for Versatile Multimodal Modelingcited by 20
- 2025System Prompt Optimization with Meta-Learningcited by 18
- 2023Provable Multi-Task Representation Learning by Two-Layer ReLU Neural Networkscited by 16
- 2024Recovering the Pre-Fine-Tuning Weights of Generative Modelscited by 16
- 2025Beyond Prompt Content: Enhancing LLM Performance via Content-Format Integrated Prompt Optimizationcited by 16
- 2024L4Q: Parameter Efficient Quantization-Aware Fine-Tuning on Large Language Modelscited by 15
- 2024Retrieve-Plan-Generation: An Iterative Planning and Answering Framework for Knowledge-Intensive LLM Generationcited by 15
- 2024PromptRR: Diffusion Models as Prompt Generators for Single Image Reflection Removalcited by 14
- 2023Exploring the Relationship between LLM Hallucinations and Prompt Linguistic Nuances: Readability, Formality, and Concretenesscited by 13
- 2024Task Prompt Vectors: Effective Initialization through Multi-Task Soft-Prompt Transfercited by 13
- 2023Soft Prompt Tuning for Augmenting Dense Retrieval with Large Language Modelscited by 12
- 2023Fine-tune Language Models to Approximate Unbiased In-context Learningcited by 12
- 2025Learning to Inference Adaptively for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 12
- 2024Fourier Prompt Tuning for Modality-Incomplete Scene Segmentationcited by 11
- 2023Soft Prompt Decoding for Multilingual Dense Retrievalcited by 10
- 2024FACTOID: FACtual enTailment fOr hallucInation Detectioncited by 10
- 2024Towards Infinite-Long Prefix in Transformercited by 10
- 2025SOFT: Selective Data Obfuscation for Protecting LLM Fine-tuning against Membership Inference Attackscited by 10
- 2023EPVT: Environment-aware Prompt Vision Transformer for Domain Generalization in Skin Lesion Recognitioncited by 9
- 2024Q-Tuning: Queue-based Prompt Tuning for Lifelong Few-shot Language Learningcited by 9
- 2025MoRE: A Mixture of Low-Rank Experts for Adaptive Multi-Task Learningcited by 9
- 2025Dynamic Prompt Fusion for Multi-Task and Cross-Domain Adaptation in LLMscited by 9
- 2023Decomposed Prompt Tuning via Low-Rank Reparameterizationcited by 8
- 2024Prompt-driven Latent Domain Generalization for Medical Image Classificationcited by 8
- 2023Zero-Shot Continuous Prompt Transfer: Generalizing Task Semantics Across Language Modelscited by 7
50 most cited of 115 All 115 (JSON)
- 2026Efficient Task Adaptation in Large Language Models: A Survey of Weight-Based, Prompt-Based, and Embedding-Based Adaptations1 Oct 2026
- 2026Mind2Dialogue: Training Human-Aware Language Models by Simulating User Mental States14 Sep 2026
- 2026Demystifying Training-Time Augmentation for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining15 Jun 2026
- 2026PEML: Parameter-efficient Multi-Task Learning with Optimized Continuous Prompts13 May 2026
- 2026Automatically Evolving Prompt Guidelines for Task-Specific Optimization7 May 2026
- 2026One Algorithm, Two Goals: Dual Scoring for Parameter and Data Selection in LLM Fine-Tuning7 May 2026
- 2026Skill Neologisms: Towards Skill-based Continual Learning6 May 2026
- 2026A Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Approach through Multitask Prompt Distillation and Decomposition for Clinical NLP8 Apr 2026
- 2026Toward Robust Open-set Adaptation: Synapse Consolidation Inspired by Rac1/MAPK Pathways1 Apr 2026
- 2026LightMoE: Reducing Mixture-of-Experts Redundancy through Expert Replacing13 Mar 2026
- 2026Deepfake Forensics Adapter: A Dual-Stream Network for Generalizable Deepfake Detection2 Mar 2026
- 2026FCN-LLM: Empower LLM for Brain Functional Connectivity Network Understanding via Graph-level Multi-task Instruction Tuning1 Mar 2026
38 more
- 2026Towards Self-Robust LLMs: Intrinsic Prompt Noise Resistance via CoIPO9 Feb 2026
- 2025Interpretable Safety Alignment via SAE-Constructed Low-Rank Subspace Adaptation29 Dec 2025
- 2025Best Practices For Empirical Meta-Algorithmic Research: Guidelines from the COSEAL Research Network18 Dec 2025
- 2025PEFT-Factory: Unified Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Autoregressive Large Language Models2 Dec 2025
- 2025Can Language Models Compose Skills In-Context?27 Oct 2025
- 2025X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Model11 Oct 2025
- 2025No Loss, No Gain: Gated Refinement and Adaptive Compression for Prompt Optimization27 Sep 2025
- 2025Towards Anytime Retrieval: A Benchmark for Anytime Person Re-Identification20 Sep 2025
- 2025CrossPT: Exploring Cross-Task Transferability through Multi-Task Prompt Tuning11 Sep 2025
- 2025Dynamic Prompt Fusion for Multi-Task and Cross-Domain Adaptation in LLMs9 Sep 2025
- 2025Memory Limitations of Prompt Tuning in Transformers30 Aug 2025
- 2025Cross-Prompt Encoder for Low-Performing Languages14 Aug 2025
- 2025Dual Information Speech Language Models for Emotional Conversations11 Aug 2025
- 2025GRID: Scaling Task-Agnostic Inference in Continual Prompt Tuning19 Jul 2025
- 2025Modeling Code: Is Text All You Need?15 Jul 2025
- 2025Stabilizing Black-Box Prompt Optimization with Textual Regularization and Signal Aggregation14 Jul 2025
- 2025A Survey on Prompt Tuning8 Jul 2025
- 2025SOFT: Selective Data Obfuscation for Protecting LLM Fine-tuning against Membership Inference Attacks12 Jun 2025
- 2025EVOREFUSE: Evolutionary Prompt Optimization for Evaluation and Mitigation of LLM Over-Refusal to Pseudo-Malicious Instructions29 May 2025
- 2025VModA: An Effective Framework for Adaptive NSFW Image Moderation29 May 2025
- 2025MoRE: A Mixture of Low-Rank Experts for Adaptive Multi-Task Learning28 May 2025
- 2025Information-Theoretic Complementary Prompts for Improved Continual Text Classification27 May 2025
- 2025System Prompt Optimization with Meta-Learning14 May 2025
- 2025PT-MoE: An Efficient Finetuning Framework for Integrating Mixture-of-Experts into Prompt Tuning14 May 2025
- 2025Block Circulant Adapter for Large Language Models1 May 2025
- 2025Efficient Knowledge Transfer in Multi-Task Learning through Task-Adaptive Low-Rank Representation20 Apr 2025
- 2025UniFlowRestore: A General Video Restoration Framework via Flow Matching and Prompt Guidance12 Apr 2025
- 2025Revisiting Prompt Optimization with Large Reasoning Models-A Case Study on Event Extraction10 Apr 2025
- 2025Learning Optimal Prompt Ensemble for Multi-source Visual Prompt Transfer9 Apr 2025
- 2025Dynamic Task Vector Grouping for Efficient Multi-Task Prompt Tuning23 Mar 2025
- 2025Learning to Inference Adaptively for Multimodal Large Language Models13 Mar 2025
- 2025GSQ-Tuning: Group-Shared Exponents Integer in Fully Quantized Training for LLMs On-Device Fine-tuning18 Feb 2025
- 2025Efficient and Effective Prompt Tuning via Prompt Decomposition and Compressed Outer Product16 Feb 2025
- 2025Beyond Prompt Content: Enhancing LLM Performance via Content-Format Integrated Prompt Optimization6 Feb 2025
- 2025ADePT: Adaptive Decomposed Prompt Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning6 Jan 2025
- 2024CLOVER: Cross-Layer Orthogonal Vectors Pruning and Fine-Tuning26 Nov 2024
- 2024Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Large Models: A Survey of Methodologies24 Oct 2024
- 2024Context-aware Prompt Tuning: Advancing In-Context Learning with Adversarial Methods22 Oct 2024
50 newest of 115 All 115 (JSON)
- 2024MixLoRA: Enhancing Large Language Models Fine-Tuning with LoRA-based Mixture of Expertscited by 147
- 2024PEMT: Multi-Task Correlation Guided Mixture-of-Experts Enables Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learningcited by 7
- 2025PT-MoE: An Efficient Finetuning Framework for Integrating Mixture-of-Experts into Prompt Tuningcited by 6
- 2023Condensing Multilingual Knowledge with Lightweight Language-Specific Modulescited by 3
- 2026LightMoE: Reducing Mixture-of-Experts Redundancy through Expert Replacingcited by 2
- 2026LightMoE: Reducing Mixture-of-Experts Redundancy through Expert Replacing13 Mar 2026
- 2025PT-MoE: An Efficient Finetuning Framework for Integrating Mixture-of-Experts into Prompt Tuning14 May 2025
- 2024MixLoRA: Enhancing Large Language Models Fine-Tuning with LoRA-based Mixture of Experts22 Apr 2024
- 2024PEMT: Multi-Task Correlation Guided Mixture-of-Experts Enables Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning23 Feb 2024
- 2023Condensing Multilingual Knowledge with Lightweight Language-Specific Modules23 May 2023
- 2025EVOREFUSE: Evolutionary Prompt Optimization for Evaluation and Mitigation of LLM Over-Refusal to Pseudo-Malicious Instructionscited by 6
- 2024COS-DPO: Conditioned One-Shot Multi-Objective Fine-Tuning Frameworkcited by 5
- 2025Interpretable Safety Alignment via SAE-Constructed Low-Rank Subspace Adaptationcited by 5
- 2025Interpretable Safety Alignment via SAE-Constructed Low-Rank Subspace Adaptation29 Dec 2025
- 2025EVOREFUSE: Evolutionary Prompt Optimization for Evaluation and Mitigation of LLM Over-Refusal to Pseudo-Malicious Instructions29 May 2025
- 2024COS-DPO: Conditioned One-Shot Multi-Objective Fine-Tuning Framework10 Oct 2024
- 2024PiSSA: Principal Singular Values and Singular Vectors Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 269
- 2023PromptAgent: Strategic Planning with Language Models Enables Expert-level Prompt Optimizationcited by 233
- 2023Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Pretrained Language Models: A Critical Review and Assessmentcited by 230
- 2023Efficient Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 186
- 2023The Troubling Emergence of Hallucination in Large Language Models -- An Extensive Definition, Quantification, and Prescriptive Remediationscited by 131
- 2023PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restorationcited by 114
- 2023Learning from models beyond fine-tuningcited by 48
- 2023LLaFS: When Large Language Models Meet Few-Shot Segmentationcited by 48
- 2024Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Large Models: A Survey of Methodologiescited by 47
- 2023When Do Prompting and Prefix-Tuning Work? A Theory of Capabilities and Limitationscited by 43
- 2024Do Large Language Models Have Compositional Ability? An Investigation into Limitations and Scalabilitycited by 40
- 2024Advancing Parameter Efficiency in Fine-tuning via Representation Editingcited by 37
12 most cited of 97 All 97 (JSON)
- 2026Efficient Task Adaptation in Large Language Models: A Survey of Weight-Based, Prompt-Based, and Embedding-Based Adaptations1 Oct 2026
- 2026Mind2Dialogue: Training Human-Aware Language Models by Simulating User Mental States14 Sep 2026
- 2026Demystifying Training-Time Augmentation for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining15 Jun 2026
- 2026PEML: Parameter-efficient Multi-Task Learning with Optimized Continuous Prompts13 May 2026
- 2026Automatically Evolving Prompt Guidelines for Task-Specific Optimization7 May 2026
- 2026One Algorithm, Two Goals: Dual Scoring for Parameter and Data Selection in LLM Fine-Tuning7 May 2026
- 2026Skill Neologisms: Towards Skill-based Continual Learning6 May 2026
- 2026A Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Approach through Multitask Prompt Distillation and Decomposition for Clinical NLP8 Apr 2026
- 2026Toward Robust Open-set Adaptation: Synapse Consolidation Inspired by Rac1/MAPK Pathways1 Apr 2026
- 2026Deepfake Forensics Adapter: A Dual-Stream Network for Generalizable Deepfake Detection2 Mar 2026
- 2026FCN-LLM: Empower LLM for Brain Functional Connectivity Network Understanding via Graph-level Multi-task Instruction Tuning1 Mar 2026
- 2026Towards Self-Robust LLMs: Intrinsic Prompt Noise Resistance via CoIPO9 Feb 2026
12 newest of 97 All 97 (JSON)