AuroRA: Breaking Low-Rank Bottleneck of LoRA with Nonlinear Mapping

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Dong, Haonan, Zhu, Wenhao, Song, Guojie, Wang, Liang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Dong, Haonan
Zhu, Wenhao
Song, Guojie
Wang, Liang
author_facet Dong, Haonan
Zhu, Wenhao
Song, Guojie
Wang, Liang
contents Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method validated across NLP and CV domains. However, LoRA faces an inherent low-rank bottleneck: narrowing its performance gap with full finetuning requires increasing the rank of its parameter matrix, resulting in significant parameter overhead. Recent linear LoRA variants have attempted to enhance expressiveness by introducing additional linear mappings; however, their composition remains inherently linear and fails to fundamentally improve LoRA's representational capacity. To address this limitation, we propose AuroRA, which incorporates an Adaptive Nonlinear Layer (ANL) between two linear projectors to capture fixed and learnable nonlinearities. This combination forms an MLP-like structure with a compressed rank, enabling flexible and precise approximation of diverse target functions while theoretically guaranteeing lower approximation errors and bounded gradients. Extensive experiments on 22 datasets and 6 pretrained models demonstrate that AuroRA: (I) not only matches or surpasses full fine-tuning performance with only 6.18% ~ 25% of LoRA's parameters but also (II) outperforms competitive PEFT methods by up to 10.88% in both NLP and CV tasks, and (III) exhibits robust performance across various rank configurations.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18738
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AuroRA: Breaking Low-Rank Bottleneck of LoRA with Nonlinear Mapping
Dong, Haonan
Zhu, Wenhao
Song, Guojie
Wang, Liang
Machine Learning
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method validated across NLP and CV domains. However, LoRA faces an inherent low-rank bottleneck: narrowing its performance gap with full finetuning requires increasing the rank of its parameter matrix, resulting in significant parameter overhead. Recent linear LoRA variants have attempted to enhance expressiveness by introducing additional linear mappings; however, their composition remains inherently linear and fails to fundamentally improve LoRA's representational capacity. To address this limitation, we propose AuroRA, which incorporates an Adaptive Nonlinear Layer (ANL) between two linear projectors to capture fixed and learnable nonlinearities. This combination forms an MLP-like structure with a compressed rank, enabling flexible and precise approximation of diverse target functions while theoretically guaranteeing lower approximation errors and bounded gradients. Extensive experiments on 22 datasets and 6 pretrained models demonstrate that AuroRA: (I) not only matches or surpasses full fine-tuning performance with only 6.18% ~ 25% of LoRA's parameters but also (II) outperforms competitive PEFT methods by up to 10.88% in both NLP and CV tasks, and (III) exhibits robust performance across various rank configurations.
title AuroRA: Breaking Low-Rank Bottleneck of LoRA with Nonlinear Mapping
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18738