Emerging trends: A gentle introduction to fine-tuning

Abstract

The previous Emerging Trends article (Church et al., 2021. Natural Language Engineering 27(5), 631-645.) introduced deep nets to poets. Poets is an imperfect metaphor, intended as a gesture toward inclusion. The future for deep nets will benefit by reaching out to a broad audience of potential users, including people with little or no programming skills, and little interest in training models. That paper focused on inference, the use of pre-trained models, as is, without fine-tuning. The goal of this paper is to make fine-tuning more accessible to a broader audience. Since fine-tuning is more challenging than inference, the examples in this paper will require modest programming skills, as well as access to a GPU. Fine-tuning starts with a general purpose base (foundation) model and uses a small training set of labeled data to produce a model for a specific downstream application. There are many examples of fine-tuning in natural language processing (question answering (SQuAD) and GLUE benchmark), as well as vision and speech.