预训练模型的稳定谱向量可复用,助力高效微调。
Pretraining Induces a Reusable Spectral Basis for Downstream Task Adaptation

- 发现预训练权重的主谱向量在微调中保持稳定且跨任务共享。
- 冻结谱向量仅优化系数,0.2%参数即可在GLUE上达到良好效果。
- 大模型预训练增强谱稳定性,提升迁移能力,适合高效适配场景。
微调预训练模型发生在参数空间的低维子空间中。以往研究聚焦于优化子空间的刻画,但忽略了关键问题:为何某些方向在微调中始终未被探索?这些稳定方向是否与下游任务无关,还是已编码任务相关结构而无需调整?回答此问题对理解知识迁移至关重要。通过在视觉与语言模型上的系统谱分析,我们发现预训练权重矩阵的主奇异向量在微调中高度稳定,并在无关下游任务间共享,揭示预训练建立了可复用的谱坐标系。在更大数据集上预训练的模型在分布偏移或任务变化下表现出更强的谱稳定性,直接将预训练规模与几何可迁移性关联。基于此,我们提出一种参数高效方法:冻结预训练奇异向量,仅优化主导谱系数,在GLUE上仅需0.2%可训练参数即实现竞争力表现。结果表明,稳定方向编码的是可迁移结构而非无关噪声:成功的预训练发现了下游任务可继承并操作的谱基。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Finetuning pretrained models occurs in a low-dimensional subspace of the full parameter space. Prior work has focused on characterizing this optimization subspace, but largely ignored the complementary question: why do certain directions remain unexplored during finetuning? Are these stable directions irrelevant to downstream tasks, or do they already encode task-relevant structure that requires no further adjustment? Answering this question is central to understanding how pretrained knowledge transfers. Through systematic spectral analysis across vision and language models, we show that the leading singular vectors of pretrained weight matrices remain highly stable under finetuning and are shared across unrelated downstream tasks, revealing that pretraining establishes a reusable spectral coordinate system. Models pretrained on larger datasets exhibit greater spectral stability under distribution shift or task change, directly linking pretraining scale to geometric transferability. Motivated by these findings, we propose a parameter-efficient method that freezes pretrained singular vectors and optimizes only leading spectral coefficients, achieving competitive performance on GLUE with 0.2% trainable parameters. Our results reveal that the stable directions encode transferable structure rather than irrelevant noise: successful pretraining discovers spectral bases that downstream tasks inherit and operate within.
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