{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/frustratingly-simple-memory-efficiency-for","title":"Vocabulary-level Memory Efficiency for Language Model Fine-tuning","arxiv_id":"2309.08708","date":"2023-09-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Miles Williams","Nikolaos Aletras"],"abstract":"The extensive memory footprint of language model (LM) fine-tuning poses a challenge for both researchers and practitioners. LMs use an embedding matrix to represent extensive vocabularies, forming a substantial proportion of the model parameters. While previous work towards memory-efficient fine-tuning has focused on minimizing the number of trainable parameters, reducing the memory footprint of the embedding matrix has yet to be explored. We first demonstrate that a significant proportion of the vocabulary remains unused during fine-tuning. We then propose a simple yet effective approach that leverages this finding to minimize memory usage. We show that our approach provides substantial reductions in memory usage across a wide range of models and tasks. Notably, our approach does not impact downstream task performance, while allowing more efficient use of computational resources.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08708v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.08708v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"frustratingly-simple-memory-efficiency-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/mlsw/dynamic-embedding-pruning","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"frustratingly-simple-memory-efficiency-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/mlsw/partial-embedding-matrix-adaptation","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"pruning","method_name":"Pruning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}