TS-PEFT: Unveiling Token-Level Redundancy in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2511.16147v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods typically operate under an implicit assumption: once a target module is selected, every token passing through it contributes equally to the downstream task and requires a parameter update. In this paper, we challenge this convention and unveil a pervasive token-level redundancy in the fine-tuning of large models. We propose TS-PEFT, a theoretically grounded framework utilizing proximal optimization to dynamically identify and skip redundant token updates during training. Our extensive experiments across Natural Language Understanding, Commonsense Reasoning, and Visual Instruction Tuning demonstrate that indiscriminately updating all tokens is not only computationally superfluous but often introduces optimization noise. Strikingly, by discarding 40%-60% of token updates, TS-PEFT consistently matches or surpasses the performance of dense baselines (e.g., LoRA, DoRA). Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis revealing that the learned token-level sparsity serves as a superior indicator of module importance compared to traditional weight norms, offering a novel data-driven perspective on the intrinsic adaptation mechanism of large models.