By reducing the curvature of the loss surface in the parameter space,Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) yields widespread robustness improvementunder domain transfer. Instead of focusing on parameters, however, this workconsiders the transferability of _representations_ as the optimizationtarget for out-of-domain generalization in a fine-tuning setup. To encourage theretention of transferable representations, we consider trust region-basedfine-tuning methods, which exploit task-specific skills without forgettingtask-agnostic representations from pre-training. We unify parameter- andrepresentation-space smoothing approaches by using trust region bounds to informSAM-style regularizers on both of these optimization surfaces. We propose**Trust Region Aware Minimization** (TRAM), a fine-tuning algorithm thatoptimizes for flat minima and smooth, informative representations withoutforgetting pre-trained structure. We find that TRAM outperforms bothsharpness-aware and trust region-based optimization methods on cross-domainlanguage modeling and cross-lingual transfer, where robustness to domaintransfer and representation generality are critical for success. TRAMestablishes a new standard in training generalizable models with minimaladditional computation.
TRAM: Bridging Trust Regions and Sharpness Aware Minimization
Tom Sherborne Naomi Saphra Pradeep Dasigi Hao Peng