{"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/toward-infinite-long-prefix-in-transformer","title":"Towards Infinite-Long Prefix in Transformer","arxiv_id":"2406.14036","date":"2024-06-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["YIngyu Liang","Zhenmei Shi","Zhao Song","Chiwun Yang"],"abstract":"Prompting and context-based fine-tuning methods, which we call Prefix Learning, have been proposed to enhance the performance of language models on various downstream tasks. They are empirically efficient and effective, matching the performance of full parameter fine-tuning, but the theoretical understandings are limited. In this paper, we aim to address this limitation by studying their ability from the perspective of prefix length. In particular, we provide a convergence guarantee for training an ultra-long prefix in a stylized setting using the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) framework. Based on this strong theoretical guarantee, we design and implement an algorithm that only needs to introduce and fine-tune a few extra trainable parameters instead of an infinite-long prefix in each layer of a transformer, and can approximate the prefix attention to a guaranteed polynomial-small error. Preliminary experimental results on vision, natural language, and math data show that our method achieves superior or competitive performance compared to existing methods like full parameters fine-tuning, P-Tuning V2, and LoRA. This demonstrates our method is promising for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our code can be found at \\url{https://github.com/ChristianYang37/chiwun/tree/main/src/NTK-Attention}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14036v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.14036v2.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":"toward-infinite-long-prefix-in-transformer","repo_url":"https://github.com/christianyang37/chiwun","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"math","task_name":"Math"},{"task_slug":"parameter-efficient-fine-tuning","task_name":"parameter-efficient fine-tuning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2406.14036","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2406.14036"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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