arXiv Machine Learning By Dianze Liu, Farshid Ghezelbash

Between Gradient and Natural Gradient: A Continuum of LoRA Initializations

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arXiv:2607. 26247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tunes large pretrained models at a fraction of the cost of full fine-tuning, but its performance depends strongly on how the adapters are initialized.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Rank-Efficient LoRA via Joint Tangent-Space Optimization under Isotropic Curvature

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