Prompt Tuning (P-tuning)

Author: CislunarSpace

Site: https://cislunarspace.cn

Definition

Prompt Tuning is a family of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques. The core idea is to prepend a set of learnable continuous vectors (called "soft prompts") to the model input, while freezing the original pretrained model weights. Only the soft prompt parameters are trained, allowing the model to adapt to different downstream tasks without modifying its own parameters.

P-tuning is an important variant of prompt tuning, proposed by Liu et al. P-tuning V2 (2021) is an improved version that achieves performance comparable to full fine-tuning across multiple scales and tasks.

P-tuning V2 Principle

The P-tuning V2 workflow is as follows:

  1. Input processing: Convert input text XX through tokenization and embedding into a vector sequence {h1,h2,...,hn}\{h_1, h_2, ..., h_n\}
  2. Add soft prompts: Prepend 128 learnable soft prompt tokens S1,S2,...,S128S_1, S_2, ..., S_{128} before the input vectors
  3. Layer-wise embeddings: Construct trainable embedding parameters corresponding to soft prompt tokens at each layer of the LLM
  4. Training: Only update soft prompt tokens and layer-wise embedding parameters; original model weights Φ0\Phi_0 remain unchanged

The input template is:

Tinput={S1,S2,…,S128,h1,h2,…,hn}T_{\text{input}} = \{S_1, S_2, \ldots, S_{128}, h_1, h_2, \ldots, h_n\}

The final model parameters combine original and new parameters:

Φ=Φ0+Δϕ\Phi = \Phi_0 + \Delta\phi

where Δϕ\Delta\phi consists of the trained new parameters.

Soft Prompts vs. Hard Prompts

The "soft prompts" in prompt tuning are fundamentally different from "hard prompts" (natural language text prompts):

FeatureHard PromptSoft Prompt
FormNatural language textLearnable parameters in continuous vector space
OptimizationManual design or searchAutomatic optimization via gradient descent
ExpressivenessLimited to discrete tokens in vocabularyCan represent continuous semantics not in vocabulary
Use casesGeneral interaction, zero-shot inferenceEfficient task-specific adaptation

Comparison with Full Fine-Tuning and LoRA

FeatureFull Fine-TuningP-tuning V2LoRA
Trainable parameters100%<1%0.1%–3%
Modification locationAll layersInput layer + layer-wise embeddingsTarget layer weight matrices
Inference overheadNoneAdditional processing for soft prompt tokensNone (after merging)
Typical modelAnyChatGLM2-6BChatGLM3-6B

Application in Spacecraft Intention Recognition

In the study by Jing et al. (2025), P-tuning V2 was used to fine-tune the ChatGLM2-6B model. Training used 128 soft prompt tokens, learning rate 0.02, max input length 256 tokens, and max output length 128 tokens. Results showed:

  • The P-tuning V2-fine-tuned ChatGLM2-6B achieved 99.81% accuracy under CoT prompts
  • Accuracy improved significantly compared to the base model
  • The CoT-prompt-fine-tuned model showed the best robustness in perturbation tests, with standard deviation close to the base model

References

  • Liu X, Ji K, Fu Y, et al. P-tuning v2: Prompt tuning can be comparable to fine-tuning universally across scales and tasks. arXiv:2110.07602, 2021.
  • Liu P, Yuan W, Fu J, et al. Pretrain, prompt, and predict: A systematic survey of prompting methods in natural language processing. ACM Comput Surv. 2023;55(9):1-35.
  • Jing H, Sun Q, Dang Z, Wang H. Intention Recognition of Space Noncooperative Targets Using Large Language Models. Space Sci. Technol. 2025;5:0271.