One Initialization to Rule them All: Fine-tuning via Explained Variance Adaptation

Fabian Paischer, Lukas, Thomas Schmied, Benedikt Alkin, Marc Peter Deisenroth, Sepp Hochreiter

One Initialization to Rule them All: Fine-tuning via Explained Variance Adaptation: 16 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #14 of 49 papers on 2024-10-10. Day-by-day upvote history.

Foundation models (FMs) are pre-trained on large-scale datasets and then fine-tuned on a downstream task for a specific application. The most successful and most commonly used fine-tuning method is to update the pre-trained weights via a low-rank adaptation (LoRA). LoRA introduces new weight matrices that are usually initialized at random with a uniform rank distribution across model weights. Recent works focus on weight-driven initialization or learning of adaptive ranks during training. Both approaches have only been investigated in isolation, resulting in slow convergence or a uniform rank distribution, in turn leading to sub-optimal performance. We propose to enhance LoRA by initializing the new weights in a data-driven manner by computing singular value decomposition on minibatches of activation vectors. Then, we initialize the LoRA matrices with the obtained right-singular vectors and re-distribute ranks among all weight matrices to explain the maximal amount of variance and continue the standard LoRA fine-tuning procedure. This results in our new method Explained Variance Adaptation (EVA). We apply EVA to a variety of fine-tuning tasks ranging from language generation and understanding to image classification and reinforcement learning. EVA exhibits faster convergence than competitors and attains the highest average score across a multitude of tasks per domain.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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