RandLoRA: Full-rank parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large models
Authors: name: Paul Albert; name: Frederic Z. Zhang; name: Hemanth Saratchandran; name: Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo; name: Anton van den Hengel; name: Ehsan Abbasnejad
Published: 2025-02-03 01:59:45

Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants have shown impressive results in
reducing the number of trainable parameters and memory requirements of large
transformer networks while maintaining fine-tuning performance. However, the
low-rank nature of the weight update inherently limits the representation power
of fine-tuned models, potentially compromising performance on complex tasks.
This raises a critical question: when a performance gap between LoRA and
standard fine-tuning is observed, is it due to the reduced number of trainable
parameters or the rank deficiency? This paper aims to answer this question by
introducing RandLoRA, a parameter-efficient method that performs full-rank
updates using a learned linear combinations of low-rank, non-trainable random
matrices. Our method limits the number of trainable parameters by restricting
optimization to diagonal scaling matrices applied to the fixed random matrices.
This allows us to effectively overcome the low-rank limitations while
maintaining parameter and memory efficiency during training. Through extensive
experimentation across vision, language, and vision-language benchmarks, we
systematically evaluate the limitations of LoRA and existing random basis
methods. Our findings reveal that full-rank updates are beneficial across
vision and language tasks individually, and even more so for vision-language
tasks, where RandLoRA significantly reduces -- and sometimes eliminates -- the
performance gap between standard fine-tuning and LoRA, demonstrating its
efficacy.