Drag-and-Drop LLMs: Zero-Shot Prompt-to-Weights

Zhiyuan Liang, Dongwen Tang, Yuhao Zhou, Xuanlei Zhao, Mingjia Shi, Wangbo Zhao, Zekai Li, Peihao Wang, Konstantin Schürholt, Damian Borth, Michael M. Bronstein, Yang You, Zhangyang Wang, Kai Wang

Keywords: Parameter Generation, Parameter-Efficient-Fine-Tuning, Large Language Models

TL;DR: Generate high-performing LoRA parameters from prompts that is unseen in training.

Abstract:

Modern Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) reduce the cost of customizing large language models (LLMs), yet still require a separate optimization run for every downstream dataset. We introduce \textbf{Drag-and-Drop LLMs (\textit{DnD})}, a prompt-conditioned parameter generator that eliminates per-task training by mapping a handful of unlabeled task prompts directly to LoRA weight updates. A lightweight text encoder distills each prompt batch into condition embeddings, which are then transformed by a cascaded hyper-convolutional decoder into the full set of LoRA matrices. Once trained in a diverse collection of
prompt-checkpoint pairs, DnD produces task-specific parameters in seconds, yielding i) up to
\textbf{12,000$\times$} lower overhead than full fine-tuning, ii) average gains up to \textbf{30\%} in performance over the strongest training LoRAs on unseen common-sense reasoning, math, coding, and multimodal benchmarks, and iii) robust cross-domain generalization improving \textbf{40\%} performance without access to the target data or labels. Our results demonstrate that prompt-conditioned parameter generation is a viable alternative to gradient-based adaptation for rapidly specializing LLMs.
We open source \href{https://jerryliang24.github.io/DnD}{our project} in support of future research.

Primary Area: General machine learning (supervised, unsupervised, online, active, etc.)

Submission Number: 2152