{"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/parameter-efficient-abstractive-question-1","title":"Parameter-Efficient Abstractive Question Answering over Tables or Text","arxiv_id":"2204.03357","date":"2022-04-07","proceeding":"dialdoc (ACL) 2022 5","authors":["Vaishali Pal","Evangelos Kanoulas","Maarten de Rijke"],"abstract":"A long-term ambition of information seeking QA systems is to reason over multi-modal contexts and generate natural answers to user queries. Today, memory intensive pre-trained language models are adapted to downstream tasks such as QA by fine-tuning the model on QA data in a specific modality like unstructured text or structured tables. To avoid training such memory-hungry models while utilizing a uniform architecture for each modality, parameter-efficient adapters add and train small task-specific bottle-neck layers between transformer layers. In this work, we study parameter-efficient abstractive QA in encoder-decoder models over structured tabular data and unstructured textual data using only 1.5% additional parameters for each modality. We also ablate over adapter layers in both encoder and decoder modules to study the efficiency-performance trade-off and demonstrate that reducing additional trainable parameters down to 0.7%-1.0% leads to comparable results. Our models out-perform current state-of-the-art models on tabular QA datasets such as Tablesum and FeTaQA, and achieve comparable performance on a textual QA dataset such as NarrativeQA using significantly less trainable parameters than fine-tuning.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03357v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.03357v1.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":"parameter-efficient-abstractive-question-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/kolk/pea-qa","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"abstractive question answering"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adapter","method_name":"Adapter"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2204.03357","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}