LoRAM: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models on Manifold

Published: 05 Mar 2025, Last Modified: 29 Mar 2025SLLMEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Track: long paper (up to 4 pages)
Keywords: low-rank adaptation, fine-tune, smooth manifold, desingularization
TL;DR: We propose to fine-tune large models on smooth manifolds with low-rank structures with Riemannian optimization techniques.
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method, has gained remarkable popularity in recent years. By freezing pretrained weights and injecting the product of two trainable low-rank matrices into certain layers of the model, LoRA significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters while introducing no additional inference latency. From an optimization perspective, the original domain consists of bounded-rank matrices, which LoRA parametrizes using the standard LR factorization. However, this parametrization has unfavorable theoretical properties, including a highly non-smooth optimization landscape and the absence of fast local convergence guarantees. In this work, we explore two alternative techniques with stronger theoretical properties for fine-tuning large models: (i) direct optimization over the set of fixed-rank matrices and (ii) optimization over bounded-rank matrices using a smooth parameterization via desingularization. Both approaches leverage well-established Riemannian manifold geometry, and we employ Riemannian Adam with coordinate-wise stepsize as the optimization algorithm. The resulting methods have comparable memory and computation complexity to LoRA optimized with Adam. We show superior performances of them on fine-tuning LLaMA for commonsense reasoning tasks.
Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.
Submission Number: 77
Loading

OpenReview is a long-term project to advance science through improved peer review with legal nonprofit status. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the OpenReview Sponsors. © 2025 OpenReview