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Hauptverfasser: Damirchi, Hamed, Rodriguez-Opazo, Cristian, Abbasnejad, Ehsan, Zhang, Zhen, Shi, Javen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22495
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author Damirchi, Hamed
Rodriguez-Opazo, Cristian
Abbasnejad, Ehsan
Zhang, Zhen
Shi, Javen
author_facet Damirchi, Hamed
Rodriguez-Opazo, Cristian
Abbasnejad, Ehsan
Zhang, Zhen
Shi, Javen
contents The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) suggests that over-parameterized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks ("winning tickets") capable of matching full model performance when trained from scratch. With the growing reliance on fine-tuning large pretrained models, we investigate whether LTH extends to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), specifically focusing on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) methods. Our key finding is that LTH holds within LoRAs, revealing sparse subnetworks that can match the performance of dense adapters. In particular, we find that the effectiveness of sparse subnetworks depends more on how much sparsity is applied in each layer than on the exact weights included in the subnetwork. Building on this insight, we propose Partial-LoRA, a method that systematically identifies said subnetworks and trains sparse low-rank adapters aligned with task-relevant subspaces of the pre-trained model. Experiments across 8 vision and 12 language tasks in both single-task and multi-task settings show that Partial-LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters by up to 87\%, while maintaining or improving accuracy. Our results not only deepen our theoretical understanding of transfer learning and the interplay between pretraining and fine-tuning but also open new avenues for developing more efficient adaptation strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_22495
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Quest for Winning Tickets in Low-Rank Adapters
Damirchi, Hamed
Rodriguez-Opazo, Cristian
Abbasnejad, Ehsan
Zhang, Zhen
Shi, Javen
Machine Learning
The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) suggests that over-parameterized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks ("winning tickets") capable of matching full model performance when trained from scratch. With the growing reliance on fine-tuning large pretrained models, we investigate whether LTH extends to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), specifically focusing on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) methods. Our key finding is that LTH holds within LoRAs, revealing sparse subnetworks that can match the performance of dense adapters. In particular, we find that the effectiveness of sparse subnetworks depends more on how much sparsity is applied in each layer than on the exact weights included in the subnetwork. Building on this insight, we propose Partial-LoRA, a method that systematically identifies said subnetworks and trains sparse low-rank adapters aligned with task-relevant subspaces of the pre-trained model. Experiments across 8 vision and 12 language tasks in both single-task and multi-task settings show that Partial-LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters by up to 87\%, while maintaining or improving accuracy. Our results not only deepen our theoretical understanding of transfer learning and the interplay between pretraining and fine-tuning but also open new avenues for developing more efficient adaptation strategies.
title The Quest for Winning Tickets in Low-Rank Adapters
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22495