Norm-Bounded Low-Rank Adaptation

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission14709 Authors

Keywords: LoRA, robustness, catastrophic forgetting

TL;DR: Complete parameterization of low-rank adpation with bounded rank and norm

Abstract: In this work, we propose norm-bounded low-rank adaptation (NB-LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine tuning. NB-LoRA is a novel parameterization of low-rank weight adaptations that admits explicit bounds on each singular value of the adaptation matrix, which can thereby satisfy any prescribed unitarily invariant norm bound, including the Schatten norms (e.g., nuclear, Frobenius, spectral norm). The proposed parameterization is unconstrained, smooth, and complete, i.e. it covers all matrices satisfying the prescribed rank and singular-value bounds. Natural language generation experiments show that NB-LoRA matches or surpasses performance of competing LoRA methods, while exhibiting stronger hyper-parameter robustness. Vision fine-tuning experiments show that NB-LoRA can avoid model catastrophic forgetting without minor cost on adaptation performance, and compared to existing approaches it is substantially more robust to a hyper-parameters such as including adaptation rank, learning rate and number of training epochs.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 14709