Activated LoRA: Fine-tuned LLMs for Intrinsics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Greenewald, Kristjan, Lastras, Luis, Parnell, Thomas, Shah, Vraj, Popa, Lucian, Zizzo, Giulio, Gunasekara, Chulaka, Rawat, Ambrish, Cox, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Greenewald, Kristjan
Lastras, Luis
Parnell, Thomas
Shah, Vraj
Popa, Lucian
Zizzo, Giulio
Gunasekara, Chulaka
Rawat, Ambrish
Cox, David
author_facet Greenewald, Kristjan
Lastras, Luis
Parnell, Thomas
Shah, Vraj
Popa, Lucian
Zizzo, Giulio
Gunasekara, Chulaka
Rawat, Ambrish
Cox, David
contents Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a highly efficient framework for finetuning the weights of large foundation models, and has become the go-to method for data-driven customization of LLMs. Despite the promise of highly customized behaviors and capabilities, switching between relevant LoRAs in a multiturn setting is inefficient, as the key-value (KV) cache of the entire turn history must be recomputed with the LoRA weights before generation can begin. To address this problem, we propose Activated LoRA (aLoRA), an adapter architecture which modifies the LoRA framework to only adapt weights for the tokens in the sequence after the aLoRA is invoked. This change crucially allows aLoRA to accept the base model's KV cache of the input string, meaning that aLoRA can be instantly activated whenever needed in a chain without recomputing the prior keys and values. This enables building what we call intrinsics, i.e. specialized models invoked to perform well-defined operations on portions of an input chain or conversation that otherwise uses the base model by default. We train a set of aLoRA-based intrinsics models, demonstrating competitive accuracy with standard LoRA while significantly improving inference efficiency. We contributed our Activated LoRA implementation to the Huggingface PEFT library https://github.com/huggingface/peft.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_12397
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Activated LoRA: Fine-tuned LLMs for Intrinsics
Greenewald, Kristjan
Lastras, Luis
Parnell, Thomas
Shah, Vraj
Popa, Lucian
Zizzo, Giulio
Gunasekara, Chulaka
Rawat, Ambrish
Cox, David
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a highly efficient framework for finetuning the weights of large foundation models, and has become the go-to method for data-driven customization of LLMs. Despite the promise of highly customized behaviors and capabilities, switching between relevant LoRAs in a multiturn setting is inefficient, as the key-value (KV) cache of the entire turn history must be recomputed with the LoRA weights before generation can begin. To address this problem, we propose Activated LoRA (aLoRA), an adapter architecture which modifies the LoRA framework to only adapt weights for the tokens in the sequence after the aLoRA is invoked. This change crucially allows aLoRA to accept the base model's KV cache of the input string, meaning that aLoRA can be instantly activated whenever needed in a chain without recomputing the prior keys and values. This enables building what we call intrinsics, i.e. specialized models invoked to perform well-defined operations on portions of an input chain or conversation that otherwise uses the base model by default. We train a set of aLoRA-based intrinsics models, demonstrating competitive accuracy with standard LoRA while significantly improving inference efficiency. We contributed our Activated LoRA implementation to the Huggingface PEFT library https://github.com/huggingface/peft.
title Activated LoRA: Fine-tuned LLMs for Intrinsics
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12397