Gaussian Stochastic Weight Averaging for Bayesian Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models

6 May 2024 · Emre Onal, Klemens Flöge, Emma Caldwell, Arsen Sheverdin, Vincent Fortuin ·

Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from overconfidence and poor calibration, particularly when fine-tuned on small datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a simple combination of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with Gaussian Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWAG), facilitating approximate Bayesian inference in LLMs. Through extensive testing across several Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks, we demonstrate that our straightforward and computationally efficient approach improves model generalization and calibration. We further show that our method exhibits greater robustness against distribution shift, as reflected in its performance on out-of-distribution tasks.

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