The paper introduces ISO-LoRA, an optimizer that improves rank utilization in Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) by coupling factor updates through spectral descent on the induced tangent perturbation in weight space. Experiments on GPT‑2 adaptation show that standard optimizers like AdamW concentrate updates in a few singular directions, whereas ISO-LoRA distributes energy more evenly, leading to higher effective rank and better downstream performance across 0.1B‑7B models. The authors provide theoretical guarantees under a stylized spiked‑gradient model and demonstrate that ISO-LoRA consistently outperforms factor‑wise optimizers, especially at moderate‑to‑large LoRA ranks.
By Zihan Zhu, Zhehang Du, Xuyang Chen, Tim Tsz-Kit Lau, Jiayuan Wu, X. Y. Han, Qi Long, Weijie Su
arXiv:2606. 16454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by parameterizing weight updates with low-rank matrices.
By Junghun Oh, Sungyong Baik, Kyoung Mu Lee
Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is the standard way to fine-tune large models, yet when its two factors are trained independently, the update ignores the geometry of the low-rank weight change it induces. We introduce LoRA-TSD, an optimizer that treats every LoRA step as a tangent vector of the fixed-rank matrix manifold and takes the spectral-norm steepest-descent step of Muon inside that tangent space, mapping the result back to the factors through a retraction native to the LoRA parametrization.
LoRA-TSD introduces a new optimizer for low‑rank adaptation (LoRA) that treats each update as a tangent vector on the fixed‑rank matrix manifold and applies a Muon‑style spectral‑norm steepest‑descent step within that tangent space. The method avoids costly full‑matrix operations and offers a retraction that is up to 2.8× cheaper than previous manifold approaches. The authors prove that their surrogate recovers LoRA‑Pro, identify the Riemannian gradient as the natural stationarity measure, and provide the first global convergence guarantees for both LoRA‑Pro and LoRA‑TSD, achieving superior performance across multiple benchmarks with Llama and Qwen models.
By Dmitrii Andriianov, Andrey Veprikov, Aleksandr Beznosikov
arXiv:2607. 27680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become the standard mechanism for fine-tuning large pretrained models, yet its statistical properties remain only partially understood.
By Arunan J
TaRA: Training-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation Initialization proposes a new way to initialize LoRA by aligning the gradients of low‑rank factors with those of the full‑rank weight matrix. This approach directly incorporates training dynamics, improving gradient fidelity at the start of fine‑tuning while adding negligible computational cost. Experiments on a variety of challenging fine‑tuning tasks show that TaRA consistently outperforms existing state‑of‑the‑art initialization methods, offering a simple, robust, and scalable solution for effective LoRA initialization.
By Taehyeon Kim, Eunhyeok Park
arXiv:2607. 09757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a cornerstone of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT); however, the conventional practice of uniform rank assignment ignores the functional heterogeneity of neural layers.
By Jiaqi Liu, Haidong Kang, Qihui Zhao, Guo Yu
arXiv:2610. 22794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A prominent family of low-rank LLM optimizers, pioneered by GaLore, performs gradient-subspace projection: at each step, they project the gradient into a low-dimensional subspace and map the update back to the full model.
By Xinyu Luo, Jincheng Zhou, Mengbo Wang, Zilin Shen, Nadia Atallah Lanman, Petros Drineas, Bruno Ribeiro, Brian Bullins
The paper presents a comprehensive framework for comparing parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) methods by treating each as a smooth map from a small parameter space into weight space, with a pretrained checkpoint as the base point. It identifies three key invariants—image near the base point, fibre dynamics, and base change—that explain expressivity, training dynamics, and initialization behavior. The authors prove numerous results about common PEFT techniques (e.g., LoRA, Householder adaptation) and classify 382 methods from 138 papers using seven coordinate descriptors.
By Xiaoyu Li, Zhizhou Sha, Chiwun Yang, Dai Shi
arXiv:2609.37027v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used approach to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), yet a performance gap can remain relative to full fine-...
By Yihao Ouyang, Shiwei Li, Haozhao Wang, Xiandi Luo, Zhuoqi Hu, Jinglun Yu, Yichen Li, Ruixuan Li
arXiv:2610.08049v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is widely used as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique for pre-trained deep neural networks, which approximates the w...
By Shoichiro Takeda, Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Satoshi Suzuki, Yasunori Akagi
The paper introduces low‑rank orthogonalization, a technique that exploits the low‑rank nature of gradients in neural network training to perform matrix orthogonalization more efficiently. Building on this, the authors present low‑rank matrix‑signed gradient descent (MSGD) and a low‑rank variant of the Muon optimizer, showing through experiments that low‑rank Muon matches or surpasses vanilla Muon on GPT‑2 and LLaMA pretraining, especially for larger models. Theoretical analysis provides iteration‑complexity bounds for both low‑rank MSGD and low‑rank Muon under heavy‑tailed noise.
By Chuan He, Zhanwang Deng, Zhaosong Lu