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
The paper introduces CLAW, a method that uses a hypernetwork to generate low‑rank adapters for world models during test time, enabling efficient adaptation to new environments with only a few episodes of interaction. By jointly pretraining the hypernetwork and base model on simulated adaptations, CLAW balances computational efficiency and expressivity, outperforming both in‑context learning and gradient‑based adaptation in locomotion and manipulation tasks. The approach also mitigates overfitting in data‑scarce regimes and demonstrates that the benefit stems from expressive adapters rather than context conditioning.
By Fernando Palafox, David Fridovich-Keil
arXiv:2606. 04536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing memory-augmented LLM agents store past experience exclusively in prompt space, as textual summaries or retrieved passages, while keeping model parameters frozen throughout a rollout.
By Tao Ren, Weiyao Luo, Hui Yang, Rongzhi Zhu, Xiang Huang, Yuchuan Wu, Bingxue Chou, Jieping Ye, Jiafeng Liang, Yongbin Li, Yijie Peng
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.
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:2601. 09361v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a key paradigm for improving large-scale reasoning models.
By Jiaying Zhang, Lei Shi, Jiguo Li, Jun Xu, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao, Renqing He
arXiv:2605.07111v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent literature on fine-tuning Large Language Models highlights a fundamental debate. While Full Fine-Tuning (FFT) provides greater represe...
By Haozhan Tang, Xiuqi Zhu, Xinyin Zhang, Boxun Li, Virginia Smith, Kevin Kuo
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
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
AirLLM introduces a hierarchical diffusion policy framework that adapts Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) rank configurations for remote fine‑tuning of large language models over wireless channels. The system uses a Proximal Policy Optimization agent to make coarse decisions based on wireless and linguistic cues, then refines these decisions with Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models to produce task‑ and channel‑specific rank vectors. Experiments across different signal‑to‑noise ratios show that AirLLM improves fine‑tuning performance while substantially lowering transmission costs.
By Shiyi Yang, Xiaoxue Yu, Rongpeng Li, Jianhang Zhu, Zhifeng Zhao, Honggang Zhang
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
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.