Transformer²: Self-adaptive LLMs 🐙

📚 [Paper] | 📄 [Blog]

Self-adaptive large language models (LLMs) aim to solve the challenges posed by traditional fine-tuning methods, which are often computationally intensive and static in their ability to handle diverse tasks.

We are excited to introduce Transformer², a novel self-adaptation framework that adapts LLMs for unseen tasks in real-time by selectively adjusting only the singular components of their weight matrices. During inference, Transformer² employs a two-pass mechanism: first, a dispatch system identifies the task properties, and then task-specific "expert" vectors, trained using reinforcement learning, are dynamically mixed to obtain targeted behavior for the incoming prompt.

Installation

1. Clone the Repo

git clone https://github.com/SakanaAI/self-adaptive-llms
cd self-adaptive-llms

2. Install Libraries

conda create -n t2 python=3.11 -y
conda activate t2
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Install Tasks Evaluator

cd evaluation/fishfarm
pip install -e .

Usage

We provide example scripts for both training and evaluation.

Please change the argument in the provided script to choose among models and tasks

Training

bash scripts/train_task_expert.sh

Evaluation

Prompt-based evaluation

Classification experts can be loaded by specifying the CLS_EXPERT_PATH in the script.

bash scripts/eval_prompt_based.sh

Few-shots evaluation

bash scripts/eval_few_shot.sh

Citation

If you find Transformer^2 useful for your research, please cite using this BibTeX:

@misc{sun2025texttransformer2selfadaptivellms,
      title={$\text{Transformer}^2$: Self-adaptive LLMs}, 
      author={Qi Sun and Edoardo Cetin and Yujin Tang},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2501.06252},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06252}, 
}