# Train More Parameters But Mind Their Placement: Insights into Language Adaptation with PEFT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12674/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00359/) (2019)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [On the Effectiveness of Adapter-based Tuning for Pretrained Language Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03164/) (2021)
- [What Happens To BERT Embeddings During Fine-tuning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14448/) (2020)
- [Reuse, Don't Retrain: A Recipe for Continued Pretraining of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07263/) (2024)
- [Monolingual or Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Which Makes a Better Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08958/) (2023)
- [Instruction-tuned Language Models are Better Knowledge Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12847/) (2024)
- [Adapters: A Unified Library for Parameter-Efficient and Modular Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11077/) (2023)
- [A Closer Look at How Fine-tuning Changes BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14282/) (2021)
- [On the Interplay Between Fine-tuning and Sentence-level Probing for Linguistic Knowledge in Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02616/) (2020)
- [Turning English-centric LLMs Into Polyglots: How Much Multilinguality Is Needed?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12683/) (2023)
- [Encoder vs Decoder: Comparative Analysis of Encoder and Decoder Language Models on Multilingual NLU Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13469/) (2024)
- [Phylogeny-Inspired Adaptation of Multilingual Models to New Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09634/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Adapting Large Language Models for Few-Shot Multilingual NLU: Are We There Yet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01929/) (2024)
- [Do Language Models Care About Text Quality? Evaluating Web-Crawled Corpora Across 11 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08693/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [One Model to Translate Them All? A Journey to Mount Doom for Multilingual Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02881/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Adapter Placement: A Dominant Adaptation Module Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06183/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Smaller LLMs still face significant challenges even in medium-resourced languages, particularly when it comes to language-specific knowledge -- a problem not easily resolved with machine-translated data. In this case study on Icelandic, we aim to enhance the generation performance of an LLM by specialising it using unstructured text corpora. A key focus is on preventing interference with the models' capabilities of handling longer context during this adaptation. Through ablation studies using various parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods and setups, we find that increasing the number of trainable parameters leads to better and more robust language adaptation. LoRAs placed in the feed-forward layers and bottleneck adapters show promising results with sufficient parameters, while prefix tuning and (IA)3 are not suitable. Although improvements are consistent in 0-shot summarisation, some adapted models struggle with longer context lengths, an issue that can be mitigated by adapting only the final layers.