Initialization using Update Approximation is a Silver Bullet for Extremely Efficient Low-Rank Fine-Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ponkshe, Kaustubh, Singhal, Raghav, Gorbunov, Eduard, Tumanov, Alexey, Horvath, Samuel, Vepakomma, Praneeth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ponkshe, Kaustubh
Singhal, Raghav
Gorbunov, Eduard
Tumanov, Alexey
Horvath, Samuel
Vepakomma, Praneeth
author_facet Ponkshe, Kaustubh
Singhal, Raghav
Gorbunov, Eduard
Tumanov, Alexey
Horvath, Samuel
Vepakomma, Praneeth
contents Low-rank adapters have become standard for efficiently fine-tuning large language models, but they often fall short of achieving the performance of full fine-tuning. We propose a method, LoRA Silver Bullet or LoRA-SB, that approximates full fine-tuning within low-rank subspaces using a carefully designed initialization strategy. We theoretically demonstrate that the architecture of LoRA-XS, which inserts a learnable r x r matrix between B and A while keeping other matrices fixed, provides the precise conditions needed for this approximation. We leverage its constrained update space to achieve optimal scaling for high-rank gradient updates while removing the need for scaling factor tuning. We prove that our initialization offers an optimal low-rank approximation of the initial gradient and preserves update directions throughout training. Extensive experiments across mathematical reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and language understanding tasks demonstrate that our approach exceeds the performance of LoRA (and baselines) while using 27-90 times fewer learnable parameters, and comprehensively outperforms LoRA-XS. Our findings establish that it is possible to simulate full fine-tuning in low-rank subspaces, and achieve significant parameter efficiency gains without sacrificing performance. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/CERT-Lab/lora-sb.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_19557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Initialization using Update Approximation is a Silver Bullet for Extremely Efficient Low-Rank Fine-Tuning
Ponkshe, Kaustubh
Singhal, Raghav
Gorbunov, Eduard
Tumanov, Alexey
Horvath, Samuel
Vepakomma, Praneeth
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Low-rank adapters have become standard for efficiently fine-tuning large language models, but they often fall short of achieving the performance of full fine-tuning. We propose a method, LoRA Silver Bullet or LoRA-SB, that approximates full fine-tuning within low-rank subspaces using a carefully designed initialization strategy. We theoretically demonstrate that the architecture of LoRA-XS, which inserts a learnable r x r matrix between B and A while keeping other matrices fixed, provides the precise conditions needed for this approximation. We leverage its constrained update space to achieve optimal scaling for high-rank gradient updates while removing the need for scaling factor tuning. We prove that our initialization offers an optimal low-rank approximation of the initial gradient and preserves update directions throughout training. Extensive experiments across mathematical reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and language understanding tasks demonstrate that our approach exceeds the performance of LoRA (and baselines) while using 27-90 times fewer learnable parameters, and comprehensively outperforms LoRA-XS. Our findings establish that it is possible to simulate full fine-tuning in low-rank subspaces, and achieve significant parameter efficiency gains without sacrificing performance. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/CERT-Lab/lora-sb.
title Initialization using Update Approximation is a Silver Bullet for Extremely Efficient Low-Rank Fine-Tuning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.19557