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
The paper introduces Activation Boundary Matching for Low‑Rank Adaptation (ABM‑LoRA), a task‑informed initialization strategy that uses the signs of layer‑wise pre‑activations from a brief probe adapter as targets for a fresh adapter. By training with a margin‑based hinge objective on these activation boundaries, ABM‑LoRA captures useful adaptation directions that standard LoRA initializers miss, while requiring only a few forward passes. Experiments show that ABM‑LoRA outperforms or matches existing LoRA, SVD, and gradient‑based initializers across multiple models and benchmarks, including T5‑base/GLUE, ConvNeXt‑T, Swin‑T, Qwen2.5‑1.5B, and LLaMA2‑7B.
By Dongha Lee, Jinhee Park, Minjun Kim, Junseok Kwon
arXiv:2602.03493v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) methods have emerged as crucial techniques for adapting large pre-trained models to downstream tasks under computational...
By Alessio Quercia, Arya Bangun, Ira Assent, Hanno Scharr
arXiv:2606. 00132v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While finetuning effectively adapts foundation models to specialized downstream tasks, it can degrade nontarget capabilities acquired during pretraining.
By Dongjun Kim, Adrian de Wynter, Huancheng Chen, Heasung Kim, Haris Vikalo
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
arXiv:2608. 12332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a significant paradigm that freezes pre-trained weights and introduces small, learnable adapters instead of fine-tuning the full set of parameters.
By Hyowon Wi, Noseong Park
In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $α$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $α$ and the learning rate function differently, with $α$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone.
arXiv:2607. 11940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As the scale of large pre-trained models continues to grow, fine-tuning them under limited memory budgets has become increasingly challenging.
By Gengyu Zhang, Haiyin Ran, Zhengbao He, Yuhang Liu, Hanling Tian, Zhehao Huang, Xiaolin Huang
arXiv:2606. 12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood.
By Zicheng Zhang, Haoran Li, Jiaxing Wang, Guoqiang Gong, Anqi Li, Yudong Hu, Ting Xiong, Yurong Gao, Junxing Hu, Zhida Jiang, Yifeng Zhang, Pengzhang Liu, Qixia Jiang
arXiv:2510. 24561v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LoRA has become a widely adopted method for PEFT, and its initialization methods have attracted increasing attention.
By Qingyue Zhang, Chang Chu, Tianren Peng, Qi Li, Xiangyang Luo, Zhihao Jiang, Shao-Lun Huang
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. 31813v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants enable parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models under the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm.
By Ruijia Zhang, Jiacheng Zhu, Hanqing Zhu, Laixi Shi