PoLAR: Polar-Decomposed Low-Rank Adapter Representation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lion, Kai, Zhang, Liang, Li, Bingcong, He, Niao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lion, Kai
Zhang, Liang
Li, Bingcong
He, Niao
author_facet Lion, Kai
Zhang, Liang
Li, Bingcong
He, Niao
contents We show that low-rank adaptation of large-scale models suffers from a low stable rank that is well below the linear algebraic rank of the subspace, degrading fine-tuning performance. To mitigate the underutilization of the allocated subspace, we propose PoLAR, a parameterization inspired by the polar decomposition that factorizes the low-rank update into two direction matrices constrained to Stiefel manifolds and an unconstrained scale matrix. Our theory shows that PoLAR yields an exponentially faster convergence rate on a canonical low-rank adaptation problem. Pairing the parameterization with Riemannian optimization leads to consistent gains on three different benchmarks testing general language understanding, commonsense reasoning, and mathematical problem solving with base model sizes ranging from 350M to 27B.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03133
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PoLAR: Polar-Decomposed Low-Rank Adapter Representation
Lion, Kai
Zhang, Liang
Li, Bingcong
He, Niao
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Signal Processing
Optimization and Control
We show that low-rank adaptation of large-scale models suffers from a low stable rank that is well below the linear algebraic rank of the subspace, degrading fine-tuning performance. To mitigate the underutilization of the allocated subspace, we propose PoLAR, a parameterization inspired by the polar decomposition that factorizes the low-rank update into two direction matrices constrained to Stiefel manifolds and an unconstrained scale matrix. Our theory shows that PoLAR yields an exponentially faster convergence rate on a canonical low-rank adaptation problem. Pairing the parameterization with Riemannian optimization leads to consistent gains on three different benchmarks testing general language understanding, commonsense reasoning, and mathematical problem solving with base model sizes ranging from 350M to 27B.
title PoLAR: Polar-Decomposed Low-Rank Adapter Representation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Signal Processing
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03133