Gradual Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation

Haoran Xu, Seth Ebner, Mahsa Yarmohammadi, Aaron Steven White, Benjamin Van Durme, Kenton W. Murray

Abstract: Fine-tuning is known to improve NLP models by adapting an initial model trained on more plentiful but less domain-salient examples to data in a target domain. Such domain adaptation is typically done using one stage of fine-tuning. We demonstrate that gradually fine-tuning in a multi-stage process can yield substantial further gains and can be applied without modifying the model or learning objective.