arXiv Machine Learning

Least but not Last: Fine-tuning Intermediate Principal Components for Better Performance-Forgetting Trade-Offs

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

Normalized Low-Rank Adaptation

Normalized Low-Rank Adaptation (NoRA) is a lightweight enhancement to the widely used LoRA technique that normalizes the down‑projection matrices during training. By doing so, NoRA stabilizes early optimization dynamics, accelerates convergence, and improves performance across pretraining, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning. The method adds no extra trainable parameters or inference‑time cost, making it broadly applicable.

By Jiale Kang, Ziyin Yue, Zheng Zhan, Yangyi Huang, Weiyang Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 3

TaRA: Training-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation Initialization

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