Learning from models beyond fine-tuning

Abstract

Foundation models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks, primarily due to their abilities to comprehend instructions and access extensive, high-quality data. These capabilities showcase the effectiveness of current foundation models and suggest a promising trajectory. Owing to multiple constraints, such as the extreme scarcity or inaccessibility of raw data used to train foundation models and the high cost of training large-scale foundation models from scratch, the use of pre-existing foundation models or application programming interfaces for downstream tasks has become a new research trend, which we call Learn from Model (LFM). LFM involves extracting and leveraging prior knowledge from foundation models through fine-tuning, editing and fusion methods and applying it to downstream tasks. We emphasize that maximizing the use of parametric knowledge in data-scarce scenarios is critical to LFM. Analysing the LFM paradigm can guide the selection of the most appropriate technology in a given scenario to minimize parameter storage and computational costs while improving the performance of foundation models on new tasks. This Review provides a comprehensive overview of current methods based on foundation models from the perspective of LFM.