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Main Authors: Lin, Hsi-Che, Yu, Yu-Chu, Chang, Kai-Po, Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12015
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author Lin, Hsi-Che
Yu, Yu-Chu
Chang, Kai-Po
Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank
author_facet Lin, Hsi-Che
Yu, Yu-Chu
Chang, Kai-Po
Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank
contents Open-source foundation models have seen rapid adoption and development, enabling powerful general-purpose capabilities across diverse domains. However, fine-tuning large foundation models for domain-specific or personalized tasks remains prohibitively expensive for most users due to the significant memory overhead beyond that of inference. We introduce EMLoC, an Emulator-based Memory-efficient fine-tuning framework with LoRA Correction, which enables model fine-tuning within the same memory budget required for inference. EMLoC constructs a task-specific light-weight emulator using activation-aware singular value decomposition (SVD) on a small downstream calibration set. Fine-tuning then is performed on this lightweight emulator via LoRA. To tackle the misalignment between the original model and the compressed emulator, we propose a novel compensation algorithm to correct the fine-tuned LoRA module, which thus can be merged into the original model for inference. EMLoC supports flexible compression ratios and standard training pipelines, making it adaptable to a wide range of applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMLoC outperforms other baselines across multiple datasets and modalities. Moreover, without quantization, EMLoC enables fine-tuning of a 38B model, which originally required 95GB of memory, on a single 24GB consumer GPU-bringing efficient and practical model adaptation to individual users.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12015
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EMLoC: Emulator-based Memory-efficient Fine-tuning with LoRA Correction
Lin, Hsi-Che
Yu, Yu-Chu
Chang, Kai-Po
Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Open-source foundation models have seen rapid adoption and development, enabling powerful general-purpose capabilities across diverse domains. However, fine-tuning large foundation models for domain-specific or personalized tasks remains prohibitively expensive for most users due to the significant memory overhead beyond that of inference. We introduce EMLoC, an Emulator-based Memory-efficient fine-tuning framework with LoRA Correction, which enables model fine-tuning within the same memory budget required for inference. EMLoC constructs a task-specific light-weight emulator using activation-aware singular value decomposition (SVD) on a small downstream calibration set. Fine-tuning then is performed on this lightweight emulator via LoRA. To tackle the misalignment between the original model and the compressed emulator, we propose a novel compensation algorithm to correct the fine-tuned LoRA module, which thus can be merged into the original model for inference. EMLoC supports flexible compression ratios and standard training pipelines, making it adaptable to a wide range of applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMLoC outperforms other baselines across multiple datasets and modalities. Moreover, without quantization, EMLoC enables fine-tuning of a 38B model, which originally required 95GB of memory, on a single 24GB consumer GPU-bringing efficient and practical model adaptation to individual users.
title EMLoC: Emulator-based Memory-efficient Fine-tuning with LoRA Correction
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12015