{"url":"/method/child-tuning","slug":"child-tuning","name":"Child-Tuning","full_name":"Child-Tuning","full_name_withheld":false,"description_markdown":"**Child-Tuning** is a fine-tuning technique that updates a subset of parameters (called child network) of large pretrained models via strategically masking out the gradients of the non-child network during the backward process. It decreases the hypothesis space of the model via a task-specific mask applied to the full gradients, helping to effectively adapt the large-scale pretrained model to various tasks and meanwhile aiming to maintain its original generalization ability.","description_state":"present","introduced_year":null,"introduced_by":{"title":"Raise a Child in Large Language Model: Towards Effective and Generalizable Fine-tuning","paper":"/paper/raise-a-child-in-large-language-model-towards","first_author":"Runxin Xu","n_authors":7,"url_abs":null,"archive_paper_url":"https://paperswithcode.com/paper/raise-a-child-in-large-language-model-towards"},"source":{"url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05687v1","title":"Raise a Child in Large Language Model: Towards Effective and Generalizable Fine-tuning","url_on_a_paper_host":true},"code_snippet_url":null,"code_snippet_url_on_a_code_host":false,"categories":[{"area":"General","area_id":"general","collection":"Fine-Tuning","url":"/methods/category/fine-tuning","pwc_aliases":[]}],"n_papers_tagged":1,"archive_num_papers":1,"papers_newest_first":[{"paper":"/paper/raise-a-child-in-large-language-model-towards","title":"Raise a Child in Large Language Model: Towards Effective and Generalizable Fine-tuning","date":"2021-09-13","arxiv_id":"2109.05687","n_code_links":3,"syntology":{"ran":0,"of":3,"unverified":3,"pointer_only":0}}],"papers_shown":1,"tasks":[{"task":"/task/language-modeling","name":"Language Modeling","papers":1},{"task":"/task/language-modelling","name":"Language Modelling","papers":1},{"task":"/task/large-language-model","name":"Large Language Model","papers":1}],"tasks_shown":3,"n_tasks":3,"usage_by_year":[{"year":"2021","papers":1}],"row_source":"methods_table","archive":{"source":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","archive_url":"https://paperswithcode.com/method/child-tuning"},"syntology_read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00"}