Improving Pretrained Language Model Fine-Tuning With Noise Stability Regularization

The advent of large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs) has contributed greatly to the progress in natural language processing (NLP). Despite its recent success and wide adoption, fine-tuning a PLM often suffers from overfitting, which leads to poor generalizability due to the extremely high complexity of the model and the limited training samples from downstream tasks. To address this problem, we propose a novel and effective fine-tuning framework, named
l
ayerwise
n
oise
s
tability
r
egularization (
LNSR
). Specifically, our method perturbs the input of neural networks with the standard Gaussian or in-manifold noise in the representation space and regularizes each layer’s output of the language model. We provide theoretical and experimental analyses to prove the effectiveness of our method. The empirical results show that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms, such as
$\text{L}^2$
norm and start point (L2-SP), Mixout, FreeLB, and smoothness inducing adversarial regularization and Bregman proximal point optimization (SMART). In addition to evaluating the proposed method on relatively simple text classification tasks, similar to the prior works, we further evaluate the effectiveness of our method on more challenging question-answering (QA) tasks. These tasks present a higher level of difficulty, and they provide a larger amount of training examples for tuning a well-generalized model. Furthermore, the empirical results indicate that our proposed method can improve the ability of language models to domain generalization.