EncT5: Fine-tuning T5 Encoder for Non-autoregressive Tasks

Encoder-decoder transformer architectures have become popular recently with the advent of T5 models. It is also more favorable over architectures like BERT for pre-training on language model task when it comes to large scale models which could take months to train given it's generality. While being able to generalize to more tasks, it is not evident if the proposed encoder-decoder architecture is the most efficient for fine-tuning on classification and regression tasks given the pre-trained model. In this work, we study fine-tuning pre-trained encoder-decoder models such as T5. Particularly, we propose \textbf{EncT5} as a way to efficiently fine-tune pre-trained encoder-decoder T5 models for classification and regression tasks by using the encoder layers. Our experimental results show that \textbf{EncT5} with less than half of the parameters of T5 performs similarly to T5 models on GLUE benchmark. We believe our proposed approach can be easily applied to any pre-trained encoder-decoder model.