Adapters Strike Back

Jan-Martin O. Steitz, Stefan Roth; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 23449-23459

Adapters provide an efficient and lightweight mechanism for adapting trained transformer models to a variety of different tasks. However they have often been found to be outperformed by other adaptation mechanisms including low-rank adaptation. In this paper we provide an in-depth study of adapters their internal structure as well as various implementation choices. We uncover pitfalls for using adapters and suggest a concrete improved adapter architecture called Adapter+ that not only outperforms previous adapter implementations but surpasses a number of other more complex adaptation mechanisms in several challenging settings. Despite this our suggested adapter is highly robust and unlike previous work requires little to no manual intervention when addressing a novel scenario. Adapter+ reaches state-of-the-art average accuracy on the VTAB benchmark even without a per-task hyperparameter optimization.