Title: BA-LoRA: Bias-Alleviating Low-Rank Adaptation to Mitigate Catastrophic Inheritance in Large Language Models
Primary area: transfer learning, meta learning, and lifelong learning
Keywords: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, PEFT, LoRA, Bias Mitigation, Catastrophic Inheritance, Representation Learning, Robustness, Large Language Models

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a de facto standard for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs). However, we identify a critical vulnerability within popular low-rank adaptation methods like LoRA: their tendency to exacerbate "Catastrophic Inheritance"—the unchecked propagation of biases, noise, and data imbalances from pre-training. This phenomenon can degrade model robustness and fairness, undermining the benefits of efficient adaptation. To address this, we introduce Bias-Alleviating Low-Rank Adaptation (BA-LoRA). Our approach is founded on a principled decomposition of Catastrophic Inheritance into three core challenges: Knowledge Drift, Representation Collapse, and Overfitting to Noise. BA-LoRA systematically mitigates these issues by incorporating a trio of targeted regularizers—consistency, diversity, and SVD—designed to preserve core knowledge, enforce representational richness, and stabilize the low-rank updates. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on a suite of natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks using diverse, prominent open-source language models (e.g., LLaMA-2-7B and DeBERTa-v3-base). Our results show that BA-LoRA not only outperforms state-of-the-art LoRA variants in terms of performance and stability, but also demonstrates quantitatively superior robustness and bias mitigation on targeted evaluations. This confirms its ability to counteract the adverse effects of Catastrophic Inheritance. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/p5q9a1z8.

TL;DR: We show PEFT can exacerbate "Catastrophic Inheritance" of pre-training biases and propose BA-LoRA, a regularization framework that systematically mitigates this issue in LoRA, yielding more robust, state-of-the-art models.