Improving LoRA with Variational Learning
Fuente:
arXiv
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866909651429228544 |
|---|---|
| author | Cong, Bai Daheim, Nico Shen, Yuesong Yokota, Rio Khan, Mohammad Emtiyaz Möllenhoff, Thomas |
| author_facet | Cong, Bai Daheim, Nico Shen, Yuesong Yokota, Rio Khan, Mohammad Emtiyaz Möllenhoff, Thomas |
| contents | Bayesian methods have recently been used to improve LoRA finetuning and, although they improve calibration, their effect on other metrics (such as accuracy) is marginal and can sometimes even be detrimental. Moreover, Bayesian methods also increase computational overheads and require additional tricks for them to work well. Here, we fix these issues by using a recently proposed variational algorithm called IVON. We show that IVON is easy to implement and has similar costs to AdamW, and yet it can also drastically improve many metrics by using a simple posterior pruning technique. We present extensive results on billion-scale LLMs (Llama and Qwen series) going way beyond the scale of existing applications of IVON. For example, we finetune a Llama-3.2-3B model on a set of commonsense reasoning tasks and improve accuracy over AdamW by 1.3% and reduce ECE by 5.4%, outperforming AdamW and other recent Bayesian methods like Laplace-LoRA and BLoB. Overall, our results show that variational learning with IVON can effectively improve LoRA finetuning. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_14280 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Improving LoRA with Variational Learning Cong, Bai Daheim, Nico Shen, Yuesong Yokota, Rio Khan, Mohammad Emtiyaz Möllenhoff, Thomas Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Bayesian methods have recently been used to improve LoRA finetuning and, although they improve calibration, their effect on other metrics (such as accuracy) is marginal and can sometimes even be detrimental. Moreover, Bayesian methods also increase computational overheads and require additional tricks for them to work well. Here, we fix these issues by using a recently proposed variational algorithm called IVON. We show that IVON is easy to implement and has similar costs to AdamW, and yet it can also drastically improve many metrics by using a simple posterior pruning technique. We present extensive results on billion-scale LLMs (Llama and Qwen series) going way beyond the scale of existing applications of IVON. For example, we finetune a Llama-3.2-3B model on a set of commonsense reasoning tasks and improve accuracy over AdamW by 1.3% and reduce ECE by 5.4%, outperforming AdamW and other recent Bayesian methods like Laplace-LoRA and BLoB. Overall, our results show that variational learning with IVON can effectively improve LoRA finetuning. |
| title | Improving LoRA with Variational Learning |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14280 |