SuperPos-Prompt: Enhancing Soft Prompt Tuning of Language Models with Superposition of Multi Token Embeddings

Soft prompt tuning techniques have recently gained traction as an effective strategy for the parameter-efficient tuning of pretrained language models, particularly minimizing the required adjustment of model parameters. Despite their growing use, achieving optimal tuning with soft prompts, especially for smaller datasets, remains a substantial challenge. This study makes two contributions in this domain: (i) we introduce SUPERPOS-PROMPT, a new reparameterization technique employing the superposition of multiple pretrained vocabulary embeddings to improve the learning of soft prompts. Our experiments across several GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks consistently highlight SUPERPOS-PROMPT's superiority over Residual Prompt tuning, exhibiting an average score increase of +6.4 in T5-Small and +5.0 in T5-Base along with a faster convergence. Remarkably, SUPERPOS-PROMPT occasionally outperforms even full fine-tuning methods. (ii) Additionally, we demonstrate enhanced performance and rapid convergence by omitting dropouts from the frozen network, yielding consistent improvements across various scenarios and tuning methods.