Cited by 31Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningTopic ModelingNatural Language Processing Techniques

AdapterSoup: Weight Averaging to Improve Generalization of Pretrained Language Models

Open access
Chronopoulou, Alexandra, Peters, Matthew, Fraser, Alexander, Dodge, Jesse·2023·Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Abstract

Pretrained language models (PLMs) are trained on massive corpora, but often need to specialize to specific domains.A parameter-efficient adaptation method suggests training an adapter for each domain on the task of language modeling.This leads to good in-domain scores but can be impractical for domain-or resourcerestricted settings.A solution is to use a relateddomain adapter for the novel domain at test time.In this paper, we introduce Adapter-Soup, an approach that performs weight-space averaging of adapters trained on different domains.Our approach is embarrassingly parallel: first, we train a set of domain-specific adapters; then, for each novel domain, we determine which adapters should be averaged at test time.We present extensive experiments showing that AdapterSoup consistently improves performance to new domains without extra training.We also explore weight averaging of adapters trained on the same domain with different hyper-parameters, and show that it preserves the performance of a PLM on new domains while obtaining strong in-domain results.We explore various approaches for choosing which adapters to combine, such as text clustering and semantic similarity.We find that using clustering leads to the most competitive results on novel domains.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.153

Cites

33 of 33 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Several parameter merging methods have been proposed in traditional deep learning to balance optimization objectives in multi-task learning.

    “In traditional deep learning, several parameter merging methods have been proposed (Wortsman et al., 2022; Chronopoulou et al., 2023; Pfeiffer et al., 2021) to balance optimization objectives in multi-task learning.”

    From Agent-Dice: Disentangling Knowledge Updates via Geometric Consensus for Agent Continual Learning (2026) · cites this paper as Chronopoulou et al., 2023

    The Introduction and §2.3 describe AdapterSoup as a parameter-merging method: it averages the weights of adapters trained on different domains. But the paper presents it as a way to improve performance on novel domains, not as a method for balancing optimization objectives in multi-task learning. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Adapter-Soups and AdapterFusion employ low-rank parameter updates.

    “Adapter-Soups and AdapterFusion employ lowrank parameter updates”

    From Agent-Dice: Disentangling Knowledge Updates via Geometric Consensus for Agent Continual Learning (2026) · cites this paper as Chronopoulou et al., 2023

    Section 2.1 describes fine-tuning adapters and averaging their weights for AdapterSoup, but does not say the updates are low-rank. A search for AdapterFusion found no passage describing that method; Section 5 instead lists adapters and LoRA layers separately. Our copy therefore does not establish the claimed property for either method. (LLM, conf=0.74)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Yaqing Wang, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Xiaodong Liu, Jing Gao, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, and Jian- feng Gao. 2022. Adamix: Mixture-of-adapter for parameter-efficient tuning of large language models. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empiri- cal Methods in Natural Language Processing, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Com- putational Linguistics. 2060
  2. Mitchell Wortsman, Gabriel Ilharco, Jong Wook Kim, Mike Li, Simon Kornblith, Rebecca Roelofs, Raphael Gontijo Lopes, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ali Farhadi, Hongseok Namkoong, and Ludwig Schmidt. 2022b. Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Com- puter Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 7959-7971. Evaluation Domains Training Domain reuters techcrunch fastco nme fool inquisitr mashable tripadv. ncbi yelp Avg dailymail 17.6 23.6 24.0 21.1 23.3 18.4 23.6 39.6 20.5 44.3 25.6 wired 18.0 22.0 21.5 22.0 22.9 18.2 22.2 40.0 19.9 41.3 24.8 express 19.5 25.8 26.0 22.6 25.8 20.1 26.3 42.9 23.3 48.9 28.1 npr 20.1 25.5 25.0 27.7 23.3 20.5 23.6 42.1 21.1 42.9 27.2 librarything 19.5 24.5 24.0 24.8 23.6 19.7 24.8 38.9 21.1 39.3 26.0 instructables 20.5 25.5 25.5 25.5 24.5 20.5 25.5 40.0 21.1 41.7 27.0 entrepreneur 18.2 22.4 22.0 22.6 22.9 18.4 23.1 40.9 21.1 43.4 25.5 springer 19.7 25.0 24.5 24.5 25.3 19.9 26.8 42.9 18.4 43.8 27.1 insiderpages 23.1 28.8 29.1 32.1 25.5 23.1 27.9 37.7 23.3 35.9 28.7 ign 18.9 23.8 23.6 22.6 23.3 18.7 23.6 40.9 21.1 39.6 25.6 eventbrite 19.1 24.3 23.8 23.1 24.3 19.3 25.0 39.6 20.9 41.7 26.1 macrumors 20.3 26.0 26.3 26.3 24.5 20.9 25.5 41.3 22.4 43.4 27.7 androidheadlines 20.7 24.8 25.8 26.0 24.5 20.1 25.3 44.7 22.6 42.9 27.8 glassdoor 20.7 26.0 25.8 27.7 24.8 21.1 26.8 42.5 22.0 42.5 28.0 pcworld 18.7 22.6 22.9 23.6 23.1 18.7 23.1 42.1 21.5 42.9 25.0 csmonitor 18.9 24.0 23.8 24.0 23.6 18.9 23.8 41.3 21.5 43.4 26.3 lonelyplanet 20.7 26.0 25.8 25.0 25.3 20.7 26.6 40.4 22.6 42.9 27.6 booking 27.4 33.4 33.1 35.9 31.5 27.4 35.5 37.0 30.6 49.4 34.1 journals 21.3 26.8 26.0 27.4 26.0 21.5 28.2 46.1 18.2 46.5 28.8 frontiersin 21.1 26.8 25.5 27.7 26.0 27.7 26.0 45.6 19.3 46.5 29.2 medium 17.8 22.2 21.8 21.3 25.0 17.8 25.3 39.3 19.9 43.4 25.4 Table 7: We show the performance of each trained adapter (for the cross-domain setting) on the 10 evaluation domains. Each model has been trained for language modeling with an initial learning rate 1e -4 for 20 epochs.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Chronopoulou, A., Peters, M., Fraser, A., & Dodge, J.
Affiliations
  • Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
  • Munich Center for Machine Learning (DE)
Venue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Published
2023
Pages
2054-2063
OpenAlex
W4386566605
Cited by
30
References
33
Citations by year
2026: 9 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1
FWCI
5.14
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Open access LMU (Ludwid Maxmilian's Universitat Munchen) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
weight averaging, adapters, pre-trained language models, domain adaptation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, test-time adaptation, domain generalization, document clustering, semantic similarity

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review