Zero-shot Learning by Generating Task-specific Adapters

Pre-trained text-to-text transformers achieve impressive performance across a wide range of NLP tasks, and they naturally support zero-shot learning (ZSL) by using the task description as prompt in the input. However, this approach has potential limitations, as it learns from input-output pairs at instance level, instead of learning to solve tasks at task level. Alternatively, applying existing ZSL methods to text-to-text transformers is non-trivial due to their text generation objective and huge size. To address these issues, we introduce Hypter, a framework that improves zero-shot transferability by training a hypernetwork to generate task-specific adapters from task descriptions. This formulation enables learning at task level, and greatly reduces the number of parameters by using light-weight adapters. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate Hypter improves upon fine-tuning baselines.