PEST: Combining Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Self-Training and Co-Training

We demonstrate how to improve the zero-shot and few-shot performance of large language models (LLMs) by using the T-Few parameter-efficient fine-tuning method (Liu et al., 2022) with self-training or co-training. Our methods apply to settings where labeled data is very limited, but unlabeled data is plentiful. Specifically, we combine T-Few with (i) the co-training techniques of Lang et al. (2022a), and (ii) SETRED, a self-training algorithm that uses a very simple data selection criterion (Li and Zhou, 2005). By using the efficient T-Few method, we are able to scale co-training to larger models (from T0-3B to T0-11B) and cut down on wallclock training time, improving the zero-shot co-training results of Lang et al. 2022a). By performing multiple iterations of self- or co-training, we significantly improve over the few-shot performance of T-Few reported by Liu et al. (2022) without using any additional labeled data. Our methods are relatively fast (2.5 hours to self-train T0-11B on a single A100 80GB) and allow T0-11B to match the few-shot performance of models with an order of magnitude more parameters.