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LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less

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arxiv 2405.09673 v2 pith:5QFDM4HM submitted 2024-05-15 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.CL
keywords lorafinetuningfulllearnslesslow-rankperformanceperturbations
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely-used parameter-efficient finetuning method for large language models. LoRA saves memory by training only low rank perturbations to selected weight matrices. In this work, we compare the performance of LoRA and full finetuning on two target domains, programming and mathematics. We consider both the instruction finetuning (approximately 100K prompt-response pairs) and continued pretraining (20B unstructured tokens) data regimes. Our results show that, in the standard low-rank settings, LoRA substantially underperforms full finetuning. Nevertheless, LoRA better maintains the base model's performance on tasks outside the target domain. We show that LoRA mitigates forgetting more than common regularization techniques such as weight decay and dropout; it also helps maintain more diverse generations. Finally, we show that full finetuning learns perturbations with a rank that is 10-100X greater than typical LoRA configurations, possibly explaining some of the reported gaps. We conclude by proposing best practices for finetuning with LoRA.

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Cited by 22 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Transplanting, inverting, and preventing a misalignment persona: method-conditional emergent misalignment in Qwen2.5

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Emergent misalignment in Qwen2.5 is mediated by a causal persona direction that low-rank LoRA recruits from covert code while full SFT does not and moves against it.

  2. Continual Learning for VLMs: A Survey and Taxonomy Beyond Forgetting

    cs.CV 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    The paper offers a comprehensive survey and proposes a new taxonomy for continual learning strategies in VLMs and MLLMs to combat catastrophic forgetting beyond traditional methods.

  3. MemSFT: Mitigating Alignment Tax with an External Parametric Memory

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    MemSFT attaches a retriever-imitating 8B memory plus a word-level router to frozen Qwen3 backbones, boosting domain scores by ~36 points while holding general-benchmark averages essentially flat, where full SFT loses ...

  4. How Meta-Learning Shapes LoRA Adapter Geometry in Speech Deepfake Detection

    eess.AS 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Meta-learning training concentrates loss-relevant LoRA updates in query/key projections and spreads them in output projections, relative to standard empirical-risk training.

  5. MoE$^2$-LoRA: When MoE Models Meet MoE-style Low-Rank Adaptation

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Routing LoRA adapters with the frozen base router's logits plus a shared cross-layer adapter pool gives the best PEFT accuracy and retention on three MoE backbones.

  6. PoLoRA: A Preconditioned Orthogonalized LoRA Optimizer

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A preconditioned, product-aware spectral optimizer for LoRA reaches Adam's final loss in 1.2–1.7x fewer steps on instruction-tuning, with ~3% per-step overhead.

  7. After the Euclidean Highway: Hyperbolic Expert AI as the Next Innovation

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Hyperbolic losses at the loss layer alone train stably at 18M-sample scale, while the same geometry inside a trainable adapter is claimed to collapse training.

  8. Pusa V1.0: Unlocking Temporal Control in Pretrained Video Diffusion Models via Vectorized Timestep Adaptation

    cs.CV 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A $500 LoRA fine-tune of Wan2.1-T2V with per-frame random timesteps matches Wan-I2V's benchmark quality and adds zero-shot start-end and video-extension capabilities.

  9. Reinforced Refinement with Self-Aware Expansion for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

    cs.RO 2025-06 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    R2SE refines pretrained end-to-end driving policies on hard cases via residual LoRA reinforcement learning and switches between specialist and generalist policies using GPD-based uncertainty.

  10. Leave it to the Specialist: Repair Sparse LLMs with Sparse Fine-Tuning via Sparsity Evolution

    cs.AI 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    SEFT fine-tunes sparse LLMs by dynamically growing and pruning a sparse set of weight updates, preserving target sparsity while improving downstream task performance over sparsity-preserving baselines.

  11. Scaling Point-in-Time Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-04 conditional novelty 5.5 of 10

    Scaling point-in-time LLMs to 4B parameters and 1T temporally filtered tokens narrows the gap to unrestricted models to about 8–11 average points and yields positive out-of-sample Sharpe ratios from news embeddings.

  12. One Student, Many Teachers: Multi-Task On-Policy Distillation via Soft-Prompt Privileged Context

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Soft-prompt teachers, each a small set of learnable tokens on a frozen backbone, can replace full fine-tuning as on-policy distillation supervisors and compose across tasks into a single student.

  13. SOS-LoRA: Static Orthogonal-Subspace Low-Rank Adaptation with Fixed Multi-Scale Scaling

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A LoRA update split into several fixed, differently-scaled low-rank experts with orthogonal input directions improves fine-tuning accuracy at the same parameter count.

  14. A Language-Guided Bayesian Optimization for Efficient LoRA Hyperparameter Search

    cs.CL 2026-01 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    LLM embeddings plus Bayesian optimization find better LoRA hyperparameters in ~30 proxy trials than standard published settings.

  15. GeRe: Towards Efficient Anti-Forgetting in Continual Learning of LLM via General Samples Replay

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A fixed 1,000-sample replay set from pretraining text, trained with a threshold-based margin loss on last-layer hidden states, reduces forgetting across 15 sequential finetuning tasks in Llama-3.1-8B.

  16. EdgeLoRA: An Efficient Multi-Tenant LLM Serving System on Edge Devices

    cs.DC 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    EdgeLoRA combines automatic adapter routing, LRU caching with a memory pool, and grouped LoRA batching to serve thousands of LoRA adapters on edge devices with up to 4x higher throughput than llama.cpp.

  17. Improving LoRA with Variational Learning

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Replacing AdamW with IVON and pruning 10% of highest-variance LoRA parameters improves average commonsense-reasoning accuracy by 1.3 points and calibration by 5.4 points on Llama-3.2-3B.

  18. SOFT: Selective Data Obfuscation for Protecting LLM Fine-tuning against Membership Inference Attacks

    cs.CR 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    SOFT paraphrases low-loss fine-tuning samples before training, reducing MIA AUC from about 0.82 to about 0.54 across six datasets at roughly 7% perplexity cost.

  19. ScatterPrism: convergence for generative simulation and inverse problems in particle and nuclear physics

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    Standard Conditional Flow Matching loss is a misleading early plateau; physics-informed metrics keep improving, so ScatterPrism and multi-metric diagnostics are needed for kinematic fidelity.

  20. LARGO: Low-Rank Regulated Gradient Projection for Robust Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning

    cs.CV 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    LARGO adds per-matrix learned projection radii and SVD-based initialization to LoRA and reports improved out-of-distribution accuracy on DomainNet, ImageNet, and VQA benchmarks.

  21. Weight Spectra Induced Efficient Model Adaptation

    cs.LG 2025-05 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    Fine-tuning mostly amplifies and reorients the top singular directions of weight matrices, and SpecLoRA learns to rescale a top-left block plus LoRA to improve PEFT performance.

  22. Mixture of Low Rank Adaptation with Partial Parameter Sharing for Time Series Forecasting

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    MoLA adapts a pre-trained short-horizon forecaster to multiple forecast steps via segment-specific mixtures of shared low-rank adapters, reporting modest mean-squared-error gains over the base models on most of eight ...

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