Balanced LoRA: Removing Parameter Invariance to Accelerate Convergence
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| author | Castin, Valérie Nadjahi, Kimia Ablin, Pierre Peyré, Gabriel |
| author_facet | Castin, Valérie Nadjahi, Kimia Ablin, Pierre Peyré, Gabriel |
| contents | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is the most widely adopted method for fine-tuning large language models. Notably, LoRA is inherently overparameterized: multiple pairs of low-rank factors can yield the same adapted weight matrix. We show--both theoretically and empirically--that these pairs exhibit significantly different condition numbers. As a result, converging to different loss minimizers directly impacts the convergence rate of LoRA. Building on this observation, we introduce Balanced Low-Rank Adaptation (BaLoRA), a variant of LoRA that projects iterates onto a balanced manifold. This manifold improves the conditioning of the loss landscape while preserving the adapted matrix. The projection step is computationally lightweight and integrates seamlessly into existing fine-tuning pipelines. Empirically, BaLoRA converges faster than standard LoRA and achieves superior performance across a range of fine-tuning tasks. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31484 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Balanced LoRA: Removing Parameter Invariance to Accelerate Convergence Castin, Valérie Nadjahi, Kimia Ablin, Pierre Peyré, Gabriel Machine Learning 68T07 Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is the most widely adopted method for fine-tuning large language models. Notably, LoRA is inherently overparameterized: multiple pairs of low-rank factors can yield the same adapted weight matrix. We show--both theoretically and empirically--that these pairs exhibit significantly different condition numbers. As a result, converging to different loss minimizers directly impacts the convergence rate of LoRA. Building on this observation, we introduce Balanced Low-Rank Adaptation (BaLoRA), a variant of LoRA that projects iterates onto a balanced manifold. This manifold improves the conditioning of the loss landscape while preserving the adapted matrix. The projection step is computationally lightweight and integrates seamlessly into existing fine-tuning pipelines. Empirically, BaLoRA converges faster than standard LoRA and achieves superior performance across a range of fine-tuning tasks. |
| title | Balanced LoRA: Removing Parameter Invariance to Accelerate Convergence |
| topic | Machine Learning 68T07 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31484 |