Expert Pyramid Tuning: Efficient Parameter Fine-Tuning for Expertise-Driven Task Allocation

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission2203 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Model, Mixture of Experts, LoRA, Fine-Tuning

Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become a dominant paradigm for deploying LLMs in multi-task scenarios due to its extreme parameter efficiency. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based LoRA variants have achieved promising results by dynamically routing tokens to different low-rank experts, they largely overlook the hierarchical nature of task complexity. Existing methods typically employ experts with uniform architectures, limiting their ability to capture diverse feature granularities required by distinct tasks—where some tasks demand high-level semantic abstraction while others require fine-grained syntactic manipulation. To bridge this gap, we propose Expert Pyramid Tuning (EPT), a novel architecture that integrates the multi-scale feature pyramid concept from computer vision into the realm of PEFT. Unlike standard LoRA, EPT decomposes task adaptation into two stages: (1) A shared meta-knowledge Subspace that encodes universal linguistic patterns in low dimensions; (2) A Pyramid Projection Mechanism that utilizes learnable up-projection operators to reconstruct high-dimensional features at varying scales. A task-aware router then dynamically selects the optimal combination of these multi-scale features. Extensive experiments across multiple multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that EPT significantly outperforms SOTA MoE-LoRA variants. Crucially, thanks to the re-parameterization capability of our design, EPT achieves this performance improvement while simultaneously reducing the number of training parameters. Our code is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EPT-B0E4.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Low-resource Methods for NLP

Research Area Keywords: pruning, parameter-efficient-training, NLP in resource-constrained settings

Contribution Types: Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 2203