Matching Tasks to Objectives: Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Tuning Strategies for Encoder-Decoder Pre-trained Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24841v1
• Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:21:03 GMT
• Title: Matching Tasks to Objectives: Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Tuning Strategies for Encoder-Decoder Pre-trained Language Models
• Abstract summary: This study explores the impact of diverse pre-training objectives on the performance of encoder-decoder pre-trained language models.<n>We highlight the benefits of incorporating multiple objectives during both pre-training and fine-tuning stages.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Prompt-based learning has emerged as a dominant paradigm in natural language processing. This study explores the impact of diverse pre-training objectives on the performance of encoder-decoder pre-trained language models across generation and question answering tasks, with a focus on commonsense knowledge retrieval and completion. We highlight the benefits of incorporating multiple objectives during both pre-training and fine-tuning stages. We introduce the Match Task to Objective (MTO) framework and methods for determining the appropriate objective for a given task. This framework offers automated methods to prepare task-related data for adaptation through unsupervised training, based on the identified objective. In the fine-tuning stage, we design novel templates that align with the objectives of the pre-training and adaptation stages. When aligned with task requirements, these strategies can achieve a performance gain of over 120\% compared to conventional methods in few-shot settings. They significantly outperform related works in few-shot settings and exceed the baseline even in full-dataset scenarios. Furthermore, we extend this approach to include prompt-tuning methodologies, providing guidance for more effective soft prompt engineering and optimization. Our strategies significantly enhance prompt-tuning performance as well. These insights hold substantial value, precisely guiding the selection and optimization of models customized for specific tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/puraminy/MTO/

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