# Scaling Down to Scale Up: A Guide to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15647 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15647/

## Key facts

- Cited by 173 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07339/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [Intrinsic Dimensionality Explains the Effectiveness of Language Model Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13255/) (2020)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 173)

- [Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14788/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06204/) (2024)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods for Pretrained Language Models: A Critical Review and Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12148/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01286/) (2024)
- [Mechanistically analyzing the effects of fine-tuning on procedurally defined tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12786/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Orthogonal Finetuning via Butterfly Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06243/) (2023)
- [Low-Rank Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18541/) (2024)
- [MiLoRA: Harnessing Minor Singular Components for Parameter-Efficient LLM Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09044/) (2024)
- [Asymmetry in Low-Rank Adapters of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16842/) (2024)
- [MA-SAM: Modality-agnostic SAM Adaptation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08842/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models in Finance (FinLLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02315/) (2024)
- [Foundation Model for Advancing Healthcare: Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03264/) (2024)
- [Efficient Benchmarking of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11696/) (2023)
- [Tracking Meets LoRA: Faster Training, Larger Model, Stronger Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05231/) (2024)
- [Learning to Route Among Specialized Experts for Zero-Shot Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05859/) (2024)
- [Adapters: A Unified Library for Parameter-Efficient and Modular Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11077/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Large Models: A Survey of Methodologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19878/) (2024)
- [When Do Prompting and Prefix-Tuning Work? A Theory of Capabilities and Limitations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19698/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances of Multimodal Continual Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05352/) (2024)
- [Low-Rank Adaptation for Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00365/) (2024)
- [TabPFN Unleashed: A Scalable and Effective Solution to Tabular Classification Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02527/) (2025)
- [DePT: Decomposed Prompt Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05173/) (2023)
- [LoRA Dropout as a Sparsity Regularizer for Overfitting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09610/) (2024)
- [APT: Adaptive Pruning and Tuning Pretrained Language Models for Efficient Training and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12200/) (2024)
- [Time-, Memory- and Parameter-Efficient Visual Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02887/) (2024)
- [Scaling Sparse Fine-Tuning to Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16405/) (2024)
- [Ladder Fine-tuning approach for SAM integrating complementary network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12737/) (2023)
- [Prompting a Pretrained Transformer Can Be a Universal Approximator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14753/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Tuning Towards Parameter and Inference Efficiency for ViT Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11808/) (2024)
- [Compress then Serve: Serving Thousands of LoRA Adapters with Little Overhead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00066/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a systematic overview of parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, covering over 50 papers published between early 2019 and mid-2024. These methods aim to address the challenges of fine-tuning large language models by training only a small subset of parameters. We provide a taxonomy that covers a broad range of methods and present a detailed method comparison with a specific focus on real-life efficiency in fine-tuning multibillion-scale language models. We also conduct an extensive head-to-head experimental comparison of 15 diverse PEFT methods, evaluating their performance and efficiency on models up to 11B parameters. Our findings reveal that methods previously shown to surpass a strong LoRA baseline face difficulties in resource-constrained settings, where hyperparameter optimization is limited and the network is fine-tuned only for a few epochs. Finally, we provide a set of practical recommendations for using PEFT methods and outline potential future research directions.