# Generalizability of Mixture of Domain-Specific Adapters from the Lens of Signed Weight Directions and its Application to Effective Model Pruning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10639/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11932/) (2019)
- [Merging Models with Fisher-Weighted Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09832/) (2021)
- [Pruning neural networks without any data by iteratively conserving synaptic flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05467/) (2020)
- [Picking Winning Tickets Before Training by Preserving Gradient Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07376/) (2020)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [Movement Pruning: Adaptive Sparsity by Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07683/) (2020)
- [Dataless Knowledge Fusion by Merging Weights of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09849/) (2022)
- [K-Adapter: Infusing Knowledge into Pre-Trained Models with Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01808/) (2020)
- [Good Debt or Bad Debt: Detecting Semantic Orientations in Economic Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1307.5336/) (2013)
- [Branch-Train-Merge: Embarrassingly Parallel Training of Expert Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03306/) (2022)
- [Pruning Neural Networks at Initialization: Why are We Missing the Mark?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08576/) (2020)
- [PubMed 200k RCT: a Dataset for Sequential Sentence Classification in Medical Abstracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06071/) (2017)
- [SparseAdapter: An Easy Approach for Improving the Parameter-Efficiency of Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04284/) (2022)
- [Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters: Decoupling and Injecting Domain Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Models Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05406/) (2023)
- [Efficient Test Time Adapter Ensembling for Low-resource Language Varieties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04877/) (2021)
- [Post-training deep neural network pruning via layer-wise calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.15023/) (2021)
- [The Topic Confusion Task: A Novel Scenario for Authorship Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08530/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [On the Risk of Evidence Pollution for Malicious Social Text Detection in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12600/) (2024)
- [Beyond Linear Activation Steering: Invertible Latent Transformations for Controlling LLM Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08454/) (2026)
- [MergeRepair: An Exploratory Study on Merging Task-Specific Adapters in Code LLMs for Automated Program Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09568/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Several parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods based on adapters have been proposed as a streamlined approach to incorporate not only a single specialized knowledge into existing Pre-Trained Language Models (PLMs) but also multiple of them at once. Recent works such as AdapterSoup propose to mix not all but only a selective sub-set of domain-specific adapters during inference via model weight averaging to optimize performance on novel, unseen domains with excellent computational efficiency. However, the essential generalizability of this emerging weight-space adapter mixing mechanism on textitunseen, in-domain examples remains unexplored. Thus, in this study, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to elucidate the generalizability of domain-specific adapter mixtures in in-domain evaluation. We also provide investigations into the inner workings of the mixture of domain-specific adapters by analyzing their weight signs, yielding critical analysis on the negative correlation between their fraction of weight sign difference and their mixtures' generalizability.