arXiv Machine Learning By Yu Sun, Junwei Zhou, Zuodong Xiang, Yike Zhang, Pengcheng Xu, Xinyu Guan, Ruoyun Ma, Hailu Xu

Static Gradient Attribution Underperforms a Density-Matched Random Mask on Loss-Based Forgetting Within LoRA B-Matrix

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The study examines parameter‑efficient continual learning with LoRA, comparing gradient‑based attribution masks to random masks for selecting adapter parameters. It finds that when both methods are restricted to the same parameter pool, uniform random masks consistently outperform gradient attribution in reducing loss‑based backward transfer across multiple seeds on the Qwen2.5‑3B model, especially on the medical task. This suggests that random masking may better balance stability and plasticity in this setting.

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