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 LoRA‑Norm, a post‑training normalization technique for Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) that rebalances the gains of learned singular directions without altering the directions themselves. LoRA‑Norm uses spectral rebalancing and nuclear‑norm restoration to preserve total spectral mass, requiring no calibration data or extra training and adding no inference overhead. Experiments on two backbones and three adaptation tasks show that LoRA‑Norm improves both specialization and capability retention, outperforming other post‑hoc spectral pruning and gradient‑guided editing methods.
By Zailong Tian, Yanzhe Chen, Zhuoheng Han, Houfeng Wang, Lizi Liao
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: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: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
The paper introduces Foundation Preserving LoRA (FoLoRA), a forgetting‑aware optimization framework that balances adaptation to downstream tasks with preservation of pretraining capabilities. FoLoRA uses a first‑order preservation condition to define a forgetting penalty based on pretraining‑proxy activations and a task utility from downstream activations, scoring update directions via a generalized Rayleigh quotient. This spectral coordinate system enables gated Adam updates that reduce low‑utility, high‑penalty directions, and the method constructs pretraining proxy calibration data by sampling from the pretrained model. Experiments on math, code, and instruction‑following tasks demonstrate that FoLoRA achieves a stronger balance between target task performance and aggregate preservation of non‑target capabilities compared to baselines.
By Dongjun Kim, Adrian de Wynter, Huancheng Chen, Heasung Kim, Haris Vikalo
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:2610.23343v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become the standard method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large pretrained models, yet theoretical explanations...
By Long Nguyen-Chi, Quynh Nguyen, Thanh Nguyen-Cung, Binh T. Nguyen
arXiv:2610.19700v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning by learning low-rank weight updates. Increasing rank expands adaptation capacity, bu...
By Fanyao Li, Yuxi Liu, Xiaohao Liu, He Chang, Zhaoxin Wang, Zhulin Tao
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.