Ensembles of Low-Rank Expert Adapters

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Yinghao, Gao, Vianne, Zhang, Chao, Torkamani, MohamadAli
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Yinghao
Gao, Vianne
Zhang, Chao
Torkamani, MohamadAli
author_facet Li, Yinghao
Gao, Vianne
Zhang, Chao
Torkamani, MohamadAli
contents The training and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involve diverse textual data from multiple sources, which poses challenges due to conflicting gradient directions, hindering optimization and specialization. These challenges can undermine model generalization across tasks, resulting in reduced downstream performance. Recent research suggests that fine-tuning LLMs on carefully selected, task-specific subsets of data can match or even surpass the performance of using the entire dataset. Building on these insights, we propose the Ensembles of Low-Rank Expert Adapters (ELREA) framework to improve the model's capability to handle diverse tasks. ELREA clusters the training instructions based on their gradient directions, representing different areas of expertise and thereby reducing conflicts during optimization. Expert adapters are then trained on these clusters, utilizing the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) technique to ensure training efficiency and model scalability. During inference, ELREA combines predictions from the most relevant expert adapters based on the input data's gradient similarity to the training clusters, ensuring optimal adapter selection for each task. Experiments show that our method outperforms baseline LoRA adapters trained on the full dataset and other ensemble approaches with similar training and inference complexity across a range of domain-specific tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_00089
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ensembles of Low-Rank Expert Adapters
Li, Yinghao
Gao, Vianne
Zhang, Chao
Torkamani, MohamadAli
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The training and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involve diverse textual data from multiple sources, which poses challenges due to conflicting gradient directions, hindering optimization and specialization. These challenges can undermine model generalization across tasks, resulting in reduced downstream performance. Recent research suggests that fine-tuning LLMs on carefully selected, task-specific subsets of data can match or even surpass the performance of using the entire dataset. Building on these insights, we propose the Ensembles of Low-Rank Expert Adapters (ELREA) framework to improve the model's capability to handle diverse tasks. ELREA clusters the training instructions based on their gradient directions, representing different areas of expertise and thereby reducing conflicts during optimization. Expert adapters are then trained on these clusters, utilizing the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) technique to ensure training efficiency and model scalability. During inference, ELREA combines predictions from the most relevant expert adapters based on the input data's gradient similarity to the training clusters, ensuring optimal adapter selection for each task. Experiments show that our method outperforms baseline LoRA adapters trained on the full dataset and other ensemble approaches with similar training and inference complexity across a range of domain-specific tasks.
title Ensembles of Low-Rank Expert Adapters
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00089