  Pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned to solve diverse NLP tasks,
including in few-shot settings. Thus fine-tuning allows the model to quickly
pick up task-specific ``skills,'' but there has been limited study of where
these newly-learnt skills reside inside the massive model. This paper
introduces the term skill localization for this problem and proposes a
solution. Given the downstream task and a model fine-tuned on that task, a
simple optimization is used to identify a very small subset of parameters
($\sim0.01$% of model parameters) responsible for ($>95$%) of the model's
performance, in the sense that grafting the fine-tuned values for just this
tiny subset onto the pre-trained model gives performance almost as well as the
fine-tuned model. While reminiscent of recent works on parameter-efficient
fine-tuning, the novel aspects here are that: (i) No further re-training is
needed on the subset (unlike, say, with lottery tickets). (ii) Notable
improvements are seen over vanilla fine-tuning with respect to calibration of
predictions in-distribution ($40$-$90$% error reduction) as well as the quality
of predictions out-of-distribution (OOD). In models trained on multiple tasks,
a stronger notion of skill localization is observed, where the sparse regions
corresponding to different tasks are almost disjoint, and their overlap (when
it happens) is a proxy for task similarity. Experiments suggest that
localization via grafting can assist certain forms of continual learning.

Computation and Language;Machine Learning