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Jul 14

CaLoRAify: Calorie Estimation with Visual-Text Pairing and LoRA-Driven Visual Language Models

The obesity phenomenon, known as the heavy issue, is a leading cause of preventable chronic diseases worldwide. Traditional calorie estimation tools often rely on specific data formats or complex pipelines, limiting their practicality in real-world scenarios. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have excelled in understanding real-world contexts and enabling conversational interactions, making them ideal for downstream tasks such as ingredient analysis. However, applying VLMs to calorie estimation requires domain-specific data and alignment strategies. To this end, we curated CalData, a 330K image-text pair dataset tailored for ingredient recognition and calorie estimation, combining a large-scale recipe dataset with detailed nutritional instructions for robust vision-language training. Built upon this dataset, we present CaLoRAify, a novel VLM framework aligning ingredient recognition and calorie estimation via training with visual-text pairs. During inference, users only need a single monocular food image to estimate calories while retaining the flexibility of agent-based conversational interaction. With Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Retrieve-augmented Generation (RAG) techniques, our system enhances the performance of foundational VLMs in the vertical domain of calorie estimation. Our code and data are fully open-sourced at https://github.com/KennyYao2001/16824-CaLORAify.

A LoRA-Based Approach to Fine-Tuning LLMs for Educational Guidance in Resource-Constrained Settings

The current study describes a cost-effective method for adapting large language models (LLMs) for academic advising with study-abroad contexts in mind and for application in low-resource methods for acculturation. With the Mistral-7B-Instruct model applied with a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method and a 4-bit quantization method, the model underwent training in two distinct stages related to this study's purpose to enhance domain specificity while maintaining computational efficiency. In Phase 1, the model was conditioned with a synthetic dataset via the Gemini Pro API, and in Phase 2, it was trained with manually curated datasets from the StudyAbroadGPT project to achieve enhanced, contextualized responses. Technical innovations entailed memory-efficient quantization, parameter-efficient adaptation, and continuous training analytics via Weights & Biases. After training, this study demonstrated a reduction in training loss by 52.7%, 92% accuracy in domain-specific recommendations, achieved 95% markdown-based formatting support, and a median run-rate of 100 samples per second on off-the-shelf GPU equipment. These findings support the effective application of instruction-tuned LLMs within educational advisers, especially in low-resource institutional scenarios. Limitations included decreased generalizability and the application of a synthetically generated dataset, but this framework is scalable for adding new multilingual-augmented and real-time academic advising processes. Future directions may include plans for the integration of retrieval-augmented generation, applying dynamic quantization routines, and connecting to real-time academic databases to increase adaptability and accuracy.

A Fine-tuning Enhanced RAG System with Quantized Influence Measure as AI Judge

This study presents an innovative enhancement to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems by seamlessly integrating fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) with vector databases. This integration capitalizes on the combined strengths of structured data retrieval and the nuanced comprehension provided by advanced LLMs. Central to our approach are the LoRA and QLoRA methodologies, which stand at the forefront of model refinement through parameter-efficient fine-tuning and memory optimization. A novel feature of our research is the incorporation of user feedback directly into the training process, ensuring the model's continuous adaptation to user expectations and thus, improving its performance and applicability. Additionally, we introduce a Quantized Influence Measure (QIM) as an innovative "AI Judge" mechanism to enhance the precision of result selection, further refining the system's accuracy. Accompanied by an executive diagram and a detailed algorithm for fine-tuning QLoRA, our work provides a comprehensive framework for implementing these advancements within chatbot technologies. This research contributes significant insights into LLM optimization for specific uses and heralds new directions for further development in retrieval-augmented models. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, our findings lay a robust foundation for future advancements in chatbot technology and retrieval systems, marking a significant step forward in the creation of more sophisticated, precise, and user-centric conversational AI systems.

Enhancing Autonomous Driving Systems with On-Board Deployed Large Language Models

Neural Networks (NNs) trained through supervised learning struggle with managing edge-case scenarios common in real-world driving due to the intractability of exhaustive datasets covering all edge-cases, making knowledge-driven approaches, akin to how humans intuitively detect unexpected driving behavior, a suitable complement to data-driven methods. This work proposes a hybrid architecture combining low-level Model Predictive Controller (MPC) with locally deployed Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance decision-making and Human Machine Interaction (HMI). The DecisionxLLM module evaluates robotic state information against natural language instructions to ensure adherence to desired driving behavior. The MPCxLLM module then adjusts MPC parameters based on LLM-generated insights, achieving control adaptability while preserving the safety and constraint guarantees of traditional MPC systems. Further, to enable efficient on-board deployment and to eliminate dependency on cloud connectivity, we shift processing to the on-board computing platform: We propose an approach that exploits Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning, and quantization. Experimental results demonstrate that these enhancements yield significant improvements in reasoning accuracy by up to 10.45%, control adaptability by as much as 52.2%, and up to 10.5x increase in computational efficiency (tokens/s), validating the proposed framework's practicality for real-time deployment even on down-scaled robotic platforms. This work bridges high-level decision-making with low-level control adaptability, offering a synergistic framework for knowledge-driven and adaptive Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS).

Cached Multi-Lora Composition for Multi-Concept Image Generation

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted technique in text-to-image models, enabling precise rendering of multiple distinct elements, such as characters and styles, in multi-concept image generation. However, current approaches face significant challenges when composing these LoRAs for multi-concept image generation, resulting in diminished generated image quality. In this paper, we initially investigate the role of LoRAs in the denoising process through the lens of the Fourier frequency domain. Based on the hypothesis that applying multiple LoRAs could lead to "semantic conflicts", we find that certain LoRAs amplify high-frequency features such as edges and textures, whereas others mainly focus on low-frequency elements, including the overall structure and smooth color gradients. Building on these insights, we devise a frequency domain based sequencing strategy to determine the optimal order in which LoRAs should be integrated during inference. This strategy offers a methodical and generalizable solution compared to the naive integration commonly found in existing LoRA fusion techniques. To fully leverage our proposed LoRA order sequence determination method in multi-LoRA composition tasks, we introduce a novel, training-free framework, Cached Multi-LoRA (CMLoRA), designed to efficiently integrate multiple LoRAs while maintaining cohesive image generation. With its flexible backbone for multi-LoRA fusion and a non-uniform caching strategy tailored to individual LoRAs, CMLoRA has the potential to reduce semantic conflicts in LoRA composition and improve computational efficiency. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that CMLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art training-free LoRA fusion methods by a significant margin -- it achieves an average improvement of 2.19% in CLIPScore, and 11.25% in MLLM win rate compared to LoraHub, LoRA Composite, and LoRA Switch.

CLoRA: A Contrastive Approach to Compose Multiple LoRA Models

Low-Rank Adaptations (LoRAs) have emerged as a powerful and popular technique in the field of image generation, offering a highly effective way to adapt and refine pre-trained deep learning models for specific tasks without the need for comprehensive retraining. By employing pre-trained LoRA models, such as those representing a specific cat and a particular dog, the objective is to generate an image that faithfully embodies both animals as defined by the LoRAs. However, the task of seamlessly blending multiple concept LoRAs to capture a variety of concepts in one image proves to be a significant challenge. Common approaches often fall short, primarily because the attention mechanisms within different LoRA models overlap, leading to scenarios where one concept may be completely ignored (e.g., omitting the dog) or where concepts are incorrectly combined (e.g., producing an image of two cats instead of one cat and one dog). To overcome these issues, CLoRA addresses them by updating the attention maps of multiple LoRA models and leveraging them to create semantic masks that facilitate the fusion of latent representations. Our method enables the creation of composite images that truly reflect the characteristics of each LoRA, successfully merging multiple concepts or styles. Our comprehensive evaluations, both qualitative and quantitative, demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methodologies, marking a significant advancement in the field of image generation with LoRAs. Furthermore, we share our source code, benchmark dataset, and trained LoRA models to promote further research on this topic.

LoRA-Composer: Leveraging Low-Rank Adaptation for Multi-Concept Customization in Training-Free Diffusion Models

Customization generation techniques have significantly advanced the synthesis of specific concepts across varied contexts. Multi-concept customization emerges as the challenging task within this domain. Existing approaches often rely on training a fusion matrix of multiple Low-Rank Adaptations (LoRAs) to merge various concepts into a single image. However, we identify this straightforward method faces two major challenges: 1) concept confusion, where the model struggles to preserve distinct individual characteristics, and 2) concept vanishing, where the model fails to generate the intended subjects. To address these issues, we introduce LoRA-Composer, a training-free framework designed for seamlessly integrating multiple LoRAs, thereby enhancing the harmony among different concepts within generated images. LoRA-Composer addresses concept vanishing through concept injection constraints, enhancing concept visibility via an expanded cross-attention mechanism. To combat concept confusion, concept isolation constraints are introduced, refining the self-attention computation. Furthermore, latent re-initialization is proposed to effectively stimulate concept-specific latent within designated regions. Our extensive testing showcases a notable enhancement in LoRA-Composer's performance compared to standard baselines, especially when eliminating the image-based conditions like canny edge or pose estimations. Code is released at https://github.com/Young98CN/LoRA_Composer

Trans-LoRA: towards data-free Transferable Parameter Efficient Finetuning

Low-rank adapters (LoRA) and their variants are popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques that closely match full model fine-tune performance while requiring only a small number of additional parameters. These additional LoRA parameters are specific to the base model being adapted. When the base model needs to be deprecated and replaced with a new one, all the associated LoRA modules need to be re-trained. Such re-training requires access to the data used to train the LoRA for the original base model. This is especially problematic for commercial cloud applications where the LoRA modules and the base models are hosted by service providers who may not be allowed to host proprietary client task data. To address this challenge, we propose Trans-LoRA -- a novel method for lossless, nearly data-free transfer of LoRAs across base models. Our approach relies on synthetic data to transfer LoRA modules. Using large language models, we design a synthetic data generator to approximate the data-generating process of the observed task data subset. Training on the resulting synthetic dataset transfers LoRA modules to new models. We show the effectiveness of our approach using both LLama and Gemma model families. Our approach achieves lossless (mostly improved) LoRA transfer between models within and across different base model families, and even between different PEFT methods, on a wide variety of tasks.

Zero-Indexing Internet Search Augmented Generation for Large Language Models

Retrieval augmented generation has emerged as an effective method to enhance large language model performance. This approach typically relies on an internal retrieval module that uses various indexing mechanisms to manage a static pre-processed corpus. However, such a paradigm often falls short when it is necessary to integrate the most up-to-date information that has not been updated into the corpus during generative inference time. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that leverages standard search engine APIs to dynamically integrate the latest online information (without maintaining any index for any fixed corpus), thereby improving the quality of generated content. We design a collaborative LLM-based paradigm, where we include: (i) a parser-LLM that determines if the Internet augmented generation is demanded and extracts the search keywords if so with a single inference; (ii) a mixed ranking strategy that re-ranks the retrieved HTML files to eliminate bias introduced from the search engine API; and (iii) an extractor-LLM that can accurately and efficiently extract relevant information from the fresh content in each HTML file. We conduct extensive empirical studies to evaluate the performance of this Internet search augmented generation paradigm. The experimental results demonstrate that our method generates content with significantly improved quality. Our system has been successfully deployed in a production environment to serve 01.AI's generative inference requests.

X-Dreamer: Creating High-quality 3D Content by Bridging the Domain Gap Between Text-to-2D and Text-to-3D Generation

In recent times, automatic text-to-3D content creation has made significant progress, driven by the development of pretrained 2D diffusion models. Existing text-to-3D methods typically optimize the 3D representation to ensure that the rendered image aligns well with the given text, as evaluated by the pretrained 2D diffusion model. Nevertheless, a substantial domain gap exists between 2D images and 3D assets, primarily attributed to variations in camera-related attributes and the exclusive presence of foreground objects. Consequently, employing 2D diffusion models directly for optimizing 3D representations may lead to suboptimal outcomes. To address this issue, we present X-Dreamer, a novel approach for high-quality text-to-3D content creation that effectively bridges the gap between text-to-2D and text-to-3D synthesis. The key components of X-Dreamer are two innovative designs: Camera-Guided Low-Rank Adaptation (CG-LoRA) and Attention-Mask Alignment (AMA) Loss. CG-LoRA dynamically incorporates camera information into the pretrained diffusion models by employing camera-dependent generation for trainable parameters. This integration enhances the alignment between the generated 3D assets and the camera's perspective. AMA loss guides the attention map of the pretrained diffusion model using the binary mask of the 3D object, prioritizing the creation of the foreground object. This module ensures that the model focuses on generating accurate and detailed foreground objects. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared to existing text-to-3D approaches. Our project webpage: https://xmuxiaoma666.github.io/Projects/X-Dreamer .

Harmonizing Visual Text Comprehension and Generation

In this work, we present TextHarmony, a unified and versatile multimodal generative model proficient in comprehending and generating visual text. Simultaneously generating images and texts typically results in performance degradation due to the inherent inconsistency between vision and language modalities. To overcome this challenge, existing approaches resort to modality-specific data for supervised fine-tuning, necessitating distinct model instances. We propose Slide-LoRA, which dynamically aggregates modality-specific and modality-agnostic LoRA experts, partially decoupling the multimodal generation space. Slide-LoRA harmonizes the generation of vision and language within a singular model instance, thereby facilitating a more unified generative process. Additionally, we develop a high-quality image caption dataset, DetailedTextCaps-100K, synthesized with a sophisticated closed-source MLLM to enhance visual text generation capabilities further. Comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Empowered by Slide-LoRA, TextHarmony achieves comparable performance to modality-specific fine-tuning results with only a 2% increase in parameters and shows an average improvement of 2.5% in visual text comprehension tasks and 4.0% in visual text generation tasks. Our work delineates the viability of an integrated approach to multimodal generation within the visual text domain, setting a foundation for subsequent inquiries.

LoRA-Pro: Are Low-Rank Adapters Properly Optimized?

Low-rank adaptation, also known as LoRA, has emerged as a prominent method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of foundation models. Despite its computational efficiency, LoRA still yields inferior performance compared to full fine-tuning. In this paper, we first uncover a fundamental connection between the optimization processes of LoRA and full fine-tuning: using LoRA for optimization is mathematically equivalent to full fine-tuning using a low-rank gradient for parameter updates. And this low-rank gradient can be expressed in terms of the gradients of the two low-rank matrices in LoRA. Leveraging this insight, we introduce LoRA-Pro, a method that enhances LoRA's performance by strategically adjusting the gradients of these low-rank matrices. This adjustment allows the low-rank gradient to more accurately approximate the full fine-tuning gradient, thereby narrowing the performance gap between LoRA and full fine-tuning. Furthermore, we theoretically derive the optimal solutions for adjusting the gradients of the low-rank matrices, applying them during fine-tuning in LoRA-Pro. We conduct extensive experiments across natural language understanding, dialogue generation, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and image classification tasks, demonstrating that LoRA-Pro substantially improves LoRA's performance, effectively narrowing the gap with full fine-tuning. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/mrflogs/LoRA-Pro.

NLoRA: Nyström-Initiated Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is essential for adapting large language models (LLMs), with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) being the most popular approach. However, LoRA suffers from slow convergence, and some recent LoRA variants, such as PiSSA, primarily rely on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for initialization, leading to expensive computation. To mitigate these problems, we use the Nystr\"om method, which follows a three-matrix manipulation. We first introduce StructuredLoRA (SLoRA), which investigates adding a small intermediate matrix between the low-rank matrices A and B. Secondly, we propose Nystr\"omLoRA (NLoRA), which leverages Nystr\"om-based initialization for SLoRA to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. Finally, we propose IntermediateTune (IntTune), which explores fine-tuning exclusively on the intermediate matrix of NLoRA to further boost LLM efficiency. We evaluate our methods on five natural language generation (NLG) tasks and eight natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. On GSM8K, SLoRA and NLoRA achieve accuracies of 56.48% and 57.70%, surpassing LoRA by 33.52% and 36.41%, with only 3.67 million additional trainable parameters. IntTune improves average NLG performance over LoRA by 7.45% while using only 1.25% of its parameters. These results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in enhancing model performance with minimal parameter overhead.

Initialization using Update Approximation is a Silver Bullet for Extremely Efficient Low-Rank Fine-Tuning

Low-rank adapters have become standard for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), but they often fall short of achieving the performance of full fine-tuning. We propose a method, LoRA Silver Bullet or LoRA-SB, that approximates full fine-tuning within low-rank subspaces using a carefully designed initialization strategy. We theoretically demonstrate that the architecture of LoRA-XS, which inserts a learnable (r x r) matrix between B and A while keeping other matrices fixed, provides the precise conditions needed for this approximation. We leverage its constrained update space to achieve optimal scaling for high-rank gradient updates while removing the need for hyperparameter tuning. We prove that our initialization offers an optimal low-rank approximation of the initial gradient and preserves update directions throughout training. Extensive experiments across mathematical reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and language understanding tasks demonstrate that our approach exceeds the performance of standard LoRA while using 27-90 times fewer learnable parameters, and comprehensively outperforms LoRA-XS. Our findings establish that it is possible to simulate full fine-tuning in low-rank subspaces, and achieve significant efficiency gains without sacrificing performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RaghavSinghal10/lora-sb.

LoRA-GA: Low-Rank Adaptation with Gradient Approximation

Fine-tuning large-scale pretrained models is prohibitively expensive in terms of computational and memory costs. LoRA, as one of the most popular Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, offers a cost-effective alternative by fine-tuning an auxiliary low-rank model that has significantly fewer parameters. Although LoRA reduces the computational and memory requirements significantly at each iteration, extensive empirical evidence indicates that it converges at a considerably slower rate compared to full fine-tuning, ultimately leading to increased overall compute and often worse test performance. In our paper, we perform an in-depth investigation of the initialization method of LoRA and show that careful initialization (without any change of the architecture and the training algorithm) can significantly enhance both efficiency and performance. In particular, we introduce a novel initialization method, LoRA-GA (Low Rank Adaptation with Gradient Approximation), which aligns the gradients of low-rank matrix product with those of full fine-tuning at the first step. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that LoRA-GA achieves a convergence rate comparable to that of full fine-tuning (hence being significantly faster than vanilla LoRA as well as various recent improvements) while simultaneously attaining comparable or even better performance. For example, on the subset of the GLUE dataset with T5-Base, LoRA-GA outperforms LoRA by 5.69% on average. On larger models such as Llama 2-7B, LoRA-GA shows performance improvements of 0.34, 11.52%, and 5.05% on MT-bench, GSM8K, and Human-eval, respectively. Additionally, we observe up to 2-4 times convergence speed improvement compared to vanilla LoRA, validating its effectiveness in accelerating convergence and enhancing model performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Outsider565/LoRA-GA.

In-Context Meta LoRA Generation

Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities for task specific fine-tuning. However, in scenarios that involve multiple tasks, training a separate LoRA model for each one results in considerable inefficiency in terms of storage and inference. Moreover, existing parameter generation methods fail to capture the correlations among these tasks, making multi-task LoRA parameter generation challenging. To address these limitations, we propose In-Context Meta LoRA (ICM-LoRA), a novel approach that efficiently achieves task-specific customization of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we use training data from all tasks to train a tailored generator, Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). CVAE takes task descriptions as inputs and produces task-aware LoRA weights as outputs. These LoRA weights are then merged with LLMs to create task-specialized models without the need for additional fine-tuning. Furthermore, we utilize in-context meta-learning for knowledge enhancement and task mapping, to capture the relationship between tasks and parameter distributions. As a result, our method achieves more accurate LoRA parameter generation for diverse tasks using CVAE. ICM-LoRA enables more accurate LoRA parameter reconstruction than current parameter reconstruction methods and is useful for implementing task-specific enhancements of LoRA parameters. At the same time, our method occupies 283MB, only 1\% storage compared with the original LoRA.

DreamSync: Aligning Text-to-Image Generation with Image Understanding Feedback

Despite their wide-spread success, Text-to-Image models (T2I) still struggle to produce images that are both aesthetically pleasing and faithful to the user's input text. We introduce DreamSync, a model-agnostic training algorithm by design that improves T2I models to be faithful to the text input. DreamSync builds off a recent insight from TIFA's evaluation framework -- that large vision-language models (VLMs) can effectively identify the fine-grained discrepancies between generated images and the text inputs. DreamSync uses this insight to train T2I models without any labeled data; it improves T2I models using its own generations. First, it prompts the model to generate several candidate images for a given input text. Then, it uses two VLMs to select the best generation: a Visual Question Answering model that measures the alignment of generated images to the text, and another that measures the generation's aesthetic quality. After selection, we use LoRA to iteratively finetune the T2I model to guide its generation towards the selected best generations. DreamSync does not need any additional human annotation. model architecture changes, or reinforcement learning. Despite its simplicity, DreamSync improves both the semantic alignment and aesthetic appeal of two diffusion-based T2I models, evidenced by multiple benchmarks (+1.7% on TIFA, +2.9% on DSG1K, +3.4% on VILA aesthetic) and human evaluation.

DataDream: Few-shot Guided Dataset Generation

While text-to-image diffusion models have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art results in image synthesis, they have yet to prove their effectiveness in downstream applications. Previous work has proposed to generate data for image classifier training given limited real data access. However, these methods struggle to generate in-distribution images or depict fine-grained features, thereby hindering the generalization of classification models trained on synthetic datasets. We propose DataDream, a framework for synthesizing classification datasets that more faithfully represents the real data distribution when guided by few-shot examples of the target classes. DataDream fine-tunes LoRA weights for the image generation model on the few real images before generating the training data using the adapted model. We then fine-tune LoRA weights for CLIP using the synthetic data to improve downstream image classification over previous approaches on a large variety of datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of DataDream through extensive experiments, surpassing state-of-the-art classification accuracy with few-shot data across 7 out of 10 datasets, while being competitive on the other 3. Additionally, we provide insights into the impact of various factors, such as the number of real-shot and generated images as well as the fine-tuning compute on model performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/DataDream.

Bridging Different Language Models and Generative Vision Models for Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generation has made significant advancements with the introduction of text-to-image diffusion models. These models typically consist of a language model that interprets user prompts and a vision model that generates corresponding images. As language and vision models continue to progress in their respective domains, there is a great potential in exploring the replacement of components in text-to-image diffusion models with more advanced counterparts. A broader research objective would therefore be to investigate the integration of any two unrelated language and generative vision models for text-to-image generation. In this paper, we explore this objective and propose LaVi-Bridge, a pipeline that enables the integration of diverse pre-trained language models and generative vision models for text-to-image generation. By leveraging LoRA and adapters, LaVi-Bridge offers a flexible and plug-and-play approach without requiring modifications to the original weights of the language and vision models. Our pipeline is compatible with various language models and generative vision models, accommodating different structures. Within this framework, we demonstrate that incorporating superior modules, such as more advanced language models or generative vision models, results in notable improvements in capabilities like text alignment or image quality. Extensive evaluations have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of LaVi-Bridge. Code is available at https://github.com/ShihaoZhaoZSH/LaVi-Bridge.

ALLoRA: Adaptive Learning Rate Mitigates LoRA Fatal Flaws

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is the bread and butter of Large Language Model (LLM) finetuning. LoRA learns an additive low-rank perturbation, AB, of a pretrained matrix parameter W to align the model to a new task or dataset with W+AB. We identify three core limitations to LoRA for finetuning--a setting that employs limited amount of data and training steps. First, LoRA employs Dropout to prevent overfitting. We prove that Dropout is only suitable for long training episodes but fails to converge to a reliable regularizer for short training episodes. Second, LoRA's initialization of B at 0 creates a slow training dynamic between A and B. That dynamic is also exacerbated by Dropout that further slows the escape from 0 for B which is particularly harmful for short training episodes. Third, the scaling factor multiplying each LoRA additive perturbation creates ``short-sighted'' interactions between the LoRA modules of different layers. Motivated by principled analysis of those limitations, we find an elegant solution: a Dropout-free, scaling-free, LoRA with Adaptive Learning rate--coined ALLoRA. By scaling the per sample and per parameter gradients with a coefficient inversely proportional to parameters' ell_2 norm, ALLoRA alleviates those three limitations. As a by-product, ALLoRA removes two hyper-parameters from LoRA: the scaling factor and the dropout rate. Empirical results show that ALLoRA admits better accuracy than LoRA on various settings, including against recent LoRA variants such as Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA). Ablation studies show our solution is the optimal in a family of weight-dependent / output-dependent approaches on various LLMs including the latest Llama3.

Precise Parameter Localization for Textual Generation in Diffusion Models

Novel diffusion models can synthesize photo-realistic images with integrated high-quality text. Surprisingly, we demonstrate through attention activation patching that only less than 1% of diffusion models' parameters, all contained in attention layers, influence the generation of textual content within the images. Building on this observation, we improve textual generation efficiency and performance by targeting cross and joint attention layers of diffusion models. We introduce several applications that benefit from localizing the layers responsible for textual content generation. We first show that a LoRA-based fine-tuning solely of the localized layers enhances, even more, the general text-generation capabilities of large diffusion models while preserving the quality and diversity of the diffusion models' generations. Then, we demonstrate how we can use the localized layers to edit textual content in generated images. Finally, we extend this idea to the practical use case of preventing the generation of toxic text in a cost-free manner. In contrast to prior work, our localization approach is broadly applicable across various diffusion model architectures, including U-Net (e.g., LDM and SDXL) and transformer-based (e.g., DeepFloyd IF and Stable Diffusion 3), utilizing diverse text encoders (e.g., from CLIP to the large language models like T5). Project page available at https://t2i-text-loc.github.io/.

Retrieval-Augmented Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Domain Tasks

Despite large successes of recent language models on diverse tasks, they suffer from severe performance degeneration in low-resource settings with limited training data available. Many existing works tackle this problem by generating synthetic data from the training data and then training models on them, recently using Large Language Models (LLMs). However, in low-resource settings, the amount of seed data samples to use for data augmentation is very small, which makes generated samples suboptimal and less diverse. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel method that augments training data by incorporating a wealth of examples from other datasets, along with the given training data. Specifically, we first retrieve the relevant instances from other datasets, such as their input-output pairs or contexts, based on their similarities with the given seed data, and then prompt LLMs to generate new samples with the contextual information within and across the original and retrieved samples. This approach can ensure that the generated data is not only relevant but also more diverse than what could be achieved using the limited seed data alone. We validate our proposed Retrieval-Augmented Data Augmentation (RADA) framework on multiple datasets under low-resource settings of training and test-time data augmentation scenarios, on which it outperforms existing LLM-powered data augmentation baselines.

Lifelong Personalized Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models for Recommendation

We primarily focus on the field of large language models (LLMs) for recommendation, which has been actively explored recently and poses a significant challenge in effectively enhancing recommender systems with logical reasoning abilities and open-world knowledge. Current mainstream efforts mainly center around injecting personalized information from recommendation models into LLMs by customizing input templates or aligning representations between semantic and recommendation spaces at the prediction layer. However, they face three significant limitations: (1) LoRA is mostly used as a core component in existing works, but personalization is not well established in LoRA parameters as the LoRA matrix shared by every user may not cater to different users' characteristics, leading to suboptimal performance. (2) Although lifelong personalized behavior sequences are ideal for personalization, their use raises effectiveness and efficiency issues since LLMs require escalating training and inference time to extend text lengths. (3) Existing approaches aren't scalable for large datasets due to training efficiency constraints. Thus, LLMs only see a small fraction of the datasets (e.g., less than 10%) instead of the whole datasets, limiting their exposure to the full training space. To address these problems, we propose RecLoRA. This model incorporates a Personalized LoRA module that maintains independent LoRAs for different users and a Long-Short Modality Retriever that retrieves different history lengths for different modalities, significantly improving performance while adding minimal time cost. Furthermore, we design a Few2Many Learning Strategy, using a conventional recommendation model as a lens to magnify small training spaces to full spaces. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our RecLoRA compared to existing baseline models.

Attention Calibration for Disentangled Text-to-Image Personalization

Recent thrilling progress in large-scale text-to-image (T2I) models has unlocked unprecedented synthesis quality of AI-generated content (AIGC) including image generation, 3D and video composition. Further, personalized techniques enable appealing customized production of a novel concept given only several images as reference. However, an intriguing problem persists: Is it possible to capture multiple, novel concepts from one single reference image? In this paper, we identify that existing approaches fail to preserve visual consistency with the reference image and eliminate cross-influence from concepts. To alleviate this, we propose an attention calibration mechanism to improve the concept-level understanding of the T2I model. Specifically, we first introduce new learnable modifiers bound with classes to capture attributes of multiple concepts. Then, the classes are separated and strengthened following the activation of the cross-attention operation, ensuring comprehensive and self-contained concepts. Additionally, we suppress the attention activation of different classes to mitigate mutual influence among concepts. Together, our proposed method, dubbed DisenDiff, can learn disentangled multiple concepts from one single image and produce novel customized images with learned concepts. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the current state of the art in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. More importantly, our proposed techniques are compatible with LoRA and inpainting pipelines, enabling more interactive experiences.

LaMDA: Large Model Fine-Tuning via Spectrally Decomposed Low-Dimensional Adaptation

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become the default approach to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) due to its significant reduction in trainable parameters. However, trainable parameter demand for LoRA increases with increasing model embedding dimensions, leading to high compute costs. Additionally, its backward updates require storing high-dimensional intermediate activations and optimizer states, demanding high peak GPU memory. In this paper, we introduce large model fine-tuning via spectrally decomposed low-dimensional adaptation (LaMDA), a novel approach to fine-tuning large language models, which leverages low-dimensional adaptation to achieve significant reductions in trainable parameters and peak GPU memory footprint. LaMDA freezes a first projection matrix (PMA) in the adaptation path while introducing a low-dimensional trainable square matrix, resulting in substantial reductions in trainable parameters and peak GPU memory usage. LaMDA gradually freezes a second projection matrix (PMB) during the early fine-tuning stages, reducing the compute cost associated with weight updates to enhance parameter efficiency further. We also present an enhancement, LaMDA++, incorporating a ``lite-weight" adaptive rank allocation for the LoRA path via normalized spectrum analysis of pre-trained model weights. We evaluate LaMDA/LaMDA++ across various tasks, including natural language understanding with the GLUE benchmark, text summarization, natural language generation, and complex reasoning on different LLMs. Results show that LaMDA matches or surpasses the performance of existing alternatives while requiring up to 17.7x fewer parameter updates and up to 1.32x lower peak GPU memory usage during fine-tuning. Code will be publicly available.

LoRA-Mixer: Coordinate Modular LoRA Experts Through Serial Attention Routing

Recent efforts to combine low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with mixture-of-experts (MoE) for adapting large language models (LLMs) to multiple tasks still exhibit prevailing limitations: they either swap entire attention/feed-forward layers for switch experts or bolt on parallel expert branches, diluting parameter efficiency and task fidelity. We propose the LoRA-Mixer, a modular and lightweight MoE framework that integrates LoRA experts. Our core innovation lies in replacing the projection matrices of the attention module's input/output linear layers with dynamically routed, task-specific LoRA experts. This design ensures seamless compatibility with diverse foundation models, including transformers and state space models (SSMs), by leveraging their inherent linear projection structures. The framework supports two operational paradigms: (1) joint optimization of LoRA experts and routing mechanisms via a novel hard-soft routing strategy, or (2) direct deployment of pre-trained, frozen LoRA modules sourced from external repositories. To enable robust router training with limited data while ensuring stable routing decisions and maximizing expert reuse, we introduce an adaptive Specialization Balance Loss (SBL) that jointly optimizes expert balance and task-specific alignment. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets, including MedQA, CoLA, SST-2, GSM8K, ARC-E, ARC-C, and HumanEval, demonstrate the effectiveness of LoRA-Mixer. On datasets such as GSM8K, HumanEval, and MedQA, LoRA-Mixer achieves significant improvements of 7.61%, 4.88%, and 3.08% over the base models, respectively. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, LoRA-Mixer achieves additional improvements of 1.09%, 1.45%, and 1.68%, respectively, using only 48% of the parameters, demonstrating its efficiency and strong performance.

The Chronicles of RAG: The Retriever, the Chunk and the Generator

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become one of the most popular paradigms for enabling LLMs to access external data, and also as a mechanism for grounding to mitigate against hallucinations. When implementing RAG you can face several challenges like effective integration of retrieval models, efficient representation learning, data diversity, computational efficiency optimization, evaluation, and quality of text generation. Given all these challenges, every day a new technique to improve RAG appears, making it unfeasible to experiment with all combinations for your problem. In this context, this paper presents good practices to implement, optimize, and evaluate RAG for the Brazilian Portuguese language, focusing on the establishment of a simple pipeline for inference and experiments. We explored a diverse set of methods to answer questions about the first Harry Potter book. To generate the answers we used the OpenAI's gpt-4, gpt-4-1106-preview, gpt-3.5-turbo-1106, and Google's Gemini Pro. Focusing on the quality of the retriever, our approach achieved an improvement of MRR@10 by 35.4% compared to the baseline. When optimizing the input size in the application, we observed that it is possible to further enhance it by 2.4%. Finally, we present the complete architecture of the RAG with our recommendations. As result, we moved from a baseline of 57.88% to a maximum relative score of 98.61%.

LoRA3D: Low-Rank Self-Calibration of 3D Geometric Foundation Models

Emerging 3D geometric foundation models, such as DUSt3R, offer a promising approach for in-the-wild 3D vision tasks. However, due to the high-dimensional nature of the problem space and scarcity of high-quality 3D data, these pre-trained models still struggle to generalize to many challenging circumstances, such as limited view overlap or low lighting. To address this, we propose LoRA3D, an efficient self-calibration pipeline to specialize the pre-trained models to target scenes using their own multi-view predictions. Taking sparse RGB images as input, we leverage robust optimization techniques to refine multi-view predictions and align them into a global coordinate frame. In particular, we incorporate prediction confidence into the geometric optimization process, automatically re-weighting the confidence to better reflect point estimation accuracy. We use the calibrated confidence to generate high-quality pseudo labels for the calibrating views and use low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the models on the pseudo-labeled data. Our method does not require any external priors or manual labels. It completes the self-calibration process on a single standard GPU within just 5 minutes. Each low-rank adapter requires only 18MB of storage. We evaluated our method on more than 160 scenes from the Replica, TUM and Waymo Open datasets, achieving up to 88% performance improvement on 3D reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation and novel-view rendering.

RealEra: Semantic-level Concept Erasure via Neighbor-Concept Mining

The remarkable development of text-to-image generation models has raised notable security concerns, such as the infringement of portrait rights and the generation of inappropriate content. Concept erasure has been proposed to remove the model's knowledge about protected and inappropriate concepts. Although many methods have tried to balance the efficacy (erasing target concepts) and specificity (retaining irrelevant concepts), they can still generate abundant erasure concepts under the steering of semantically related inputs. In this work, we propose RealEra to address this "concept residue" issue. Specifically, we first introduce the mechanism of neighbor-concept mining, digging out the associated concepts by adding random perturbation into the embedding of erasure concept, thus expanding the erasing range and eliminating the generations even through associated concept inputs. Furthermore, to mitigate the negative impact on the generation of irrelevant concepts caused by the expansion of erasure scope, RealEra preserves the specificity through the beyond-concept regularization. This makes irrelevant concepts maintain their corresponding spatial position, thereby preserving their normal generation performance. We also employ the closed-form solution to optimize weights of U-Net for the cross-attention alignment, as well as the prediction noise alignment with the LoRA module. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that RealEra outperforms previous concept erasing methods in terms of superior erasing efficacy, specificity, and generality. More details are available on our project page https://realerasing.github.io/RealEra/ .

MixLoRA: Enhancing Large Language Models Fine-Tuning with LoRA based Mixture of Experts

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional performance across a wide array of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Fine-tuning techniques are commonly utilized to tailor pre-trained models to specific applications. While methods like LoRA have effectively tackled GPU memory constraints during fine-tuning, their applicability is often restricted to limited performance, especially on multi-task. On the other hand, Mix-of-Expert (MoE) models, such as Mixtral 8x7B, demonstrate remarkable performance across multiple NLP tasks while maintaining a reduced parameter count. However, the resource requirements of these MoEs still challenging, particularly for consumer-grade GPUs only have limited VRAM. To address these challenge, we propose MixLoRA, an innovative approach aimed at constructing a resource-efficient sparse MoE model based on LoRA. MixLoRA inserts multiple LoRA-based experts within the feed-forward network block of a frozen pre-trained dense model through fine-tuning, employing a commonly used top-k router. Unlike other LoRA based MoE methods, MixLoRA enhances model performance by utilizing independently configurable attention-layer LoRA adapters, supporting the use of LoRA and its variants for the construction of experts, and applying auxiliary load balance loss to address the imbalance problem of the router. In experiments, MixLoRA achieves commendable performance across all evaluation metrics in both single-task and multi-task learning scenarios. Implemented within the m-LoRA framework, MixLoRA enables parallel fine-tuning of multiple mixture-of-experts models on a single 24GB consumer-grade GPU without quantization, thereby reducing GPU memory consumption by 41\% and latency during the training process by 17\%.

MuseumMaker: Continual Style Customization without Catastrophic Forgetting

Pre-trained large text-to-image (T2I) models with an appropriate text prompt has attracted growing interests in customized images generation field. However, catastrophic forgetting issue make it hard to continually synthesize new user-provided styles while retaining the satisfying results amongst learned styles. In this paper, we propose MuseumMaker, a method that enables the synthesis of images by following a set of customized styles in a never-end manner, and gradually accumulate these creative artistic works as a Museum. When facing with a new customization style, we develop a style distillation loss module to extract and learn the styles of the training data for new image generation. It can minimize the learning biases caused by content of new training images, and address the catastrophic overfitting issue induced by few-shot images. To deal with catastrophic forgetting amongst past learned styles, we devise a dual regularization for shared-LoRA module to optimize the direction of model update, which could regularize the diffusion model from both weight and feature aspects, respectively. Meanwhile, to further preserve historical knowledge from past styles and address the limited representability of LoRA, we consider a task-wise token learning module where a unique token embedding is learned to denote a new style. As any new user-provided style come, our MuseumMaker can capture the nuances of the new styles while maintaining the details of learned styles. Experimental results on diverse style datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed MuseumMaker method, showcasing its robustness and versatility across various scenarios.

Merging LoRAs like Playing LEGO: Pushing the Modularity of LoRA to Extremes Through Rank-Wise Clustering

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a popular technique for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to various domains due to its modular design and widespread availability on platforms like Huggingface. This modularity has sparked interest in combining multiple LoRAs to enhance LLM capabilities. However, existing methods for LoRA composition primarily focus on task-specific adaptations that require additional training, and current model merging techniques often fail to fully leverage LoRA's modular nature, leading to parameter interference and performance degradation. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of disassembling and reassembling multiple LoRAs at a finer granularity, analogous to assembling LEGO blocks. We introduce the concept of Minimal Semantic Units (MSUs), where the parameters corresponding to each rank in LoRA function as independent units. These MSUs demonstrate permutation invariance and concatenation-summation equivalence properties, enabling flexible combinations to create new LoRAs. Building on these insights, we propose the LoRA-LEGO framework. This framework conducts rank-wise parameter clustering by grouping MSUs from different LoRAs into k clusters. The centroid of each cluster serves as a representative MSU, enabling the assembly of a merged LoRA with an adjusted rank of k. Additionally, we apply a dual reweighting strategy to optimize the scale of the merged LoRA. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in LoRA merging.

One Head Eight Arms: Block Matrix based Low Rank Adaptation for CLIP-based Few-Shot Learning

Recent advancements in fine-tuning Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLMs) have garnered significant attention for their effectiveness in downstream few-shot learning tasks.While these recent approaches exhibits some performance improvements, they often suffer from excessive training parameters and high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Block matrix-based low-rank adaptation framework, called Block-LoRA, for fine-tuning VLMs on downstream few-shot tasks. Inspired by recent work on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Block-LoRA partitions the original low-rank decomposition matrix of LoRA into a series of sub-matrices while sharing all down-projection sub-matrices. This structure not only reduces the number of training parameters, but also transforms certain complex matrix multiplication operations into simpler matrix addition, significantly lowering the computational cost of fine-tuning. Notably, Block-LoRA enables fine-tuning CLIP on the ImageNet few-shot benchmark using a single 24GB GPU. We also show that Block-LoRA has the more tighter bound of generalization error than vanilla LoRA. Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments demonstrate that Block-LoRA achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art CLIP-based few-shot methods, while maintaining a low training parameters count and reduced computational overhead.

X2I: Seamless Integration of Multimodal Understanding into Diffusion Transformer via Attention Distillation

Text-to-image (T2I) models are well known for their ability to produce highly realistic images, while multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are renowned for their proficiency in understanding and integrating multiple modalities. However, currently there is no straightforward and efficient framework to transfer the multimodal comprehension abilities of MLLMs to T2I models to enable them to understand multimodal inputs. In this paper, we propose the X2I framework, which endows Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models with the capability to comprehend various modalities, including multilingual text, screenshot documents, images, videos, and audio. X2I is trained using merely 100K English corpus with 160 GPU hours. Building on the DiT teacher model, we adopt an innovative distillation method to extract the inference capabilities of the teacher model and design a lightweight AlignNet structure to serve as an intermediate bridge. Compared to the teacher model, X2I shows a decrease in performance degradation of less than 1\% while gaining various multimodal understanding abilities, including multilingual to image, image to image, image-text to image, video to image, audio to image, and utilizing creative fusion to enhance imagery. Furthermore, it is applicable for LoRA training in the context of image-text to image generation, filling a void in the industry in this area. We further design a simple LightControl to enhance the fidelity of instructional image editing. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, multifunctionality, and transferability of our X2I. The open-source code and checkpoints for X2I can be found at the following link: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/X2I.

DyLoRA: Parameter Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Models using Dynamic Search-Free Low-Rank Adaptation

With the ever-growing size of pretrained models (PMs), fine-tuning them has become more expensive and resource-hungry. As a remedy, low-rank adapters (LoRA) keep the main pretrained weights of the model frozen and just introduce some learnable truncated SVD modules (so-called LoRA blocks) to the model. While LoRA blocks are parameter-efficient, they suffer from two major problems: first, the size of these blocks is fixed and cannot be modified after training (for example, if we need to change the rank of LoRA blocks, then we need to re-train them from scratch); second, optimizing their rank requires an exhaustive search and effort. In this work, we introduce a dynamic low-rank adaptation (DyLoRA) technique to address these two problems together. Our DyLoRA method trains LoRA blocks for a range of ranks instead of a single rank by sorting the representation learned by the adapter module at different ranks during training. We evaluate our solution on different natural language understanding (GLUE benchmark) and language generation tasks (E2E, DART and WebNLG) using different pretrained models such as RoBERTa and GPT with different sizes. Our results show that we can train dynamic search-free models with DyLoRA at least 4 to 7 times (depending to the task) faster than LoRA without significantly compromising performance. Moreover, our models can perform consistently well on a much larger range of ranks compared to LoRA.

LoLDU: Low-Rank Adaptation via Lower-Diag-Upper Decomposition for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

The rapid growth of model scale has necessitated substantial computational resources for fine-tuning. Existing approach such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has sought to address the problem of handling the large updated parameters in full fine-tuning. However, LoRA utilize random initialization and optimization of low-rank matrices to approximate updated weights, which can result in suboptimal convergence and an accuracy gap compared to full fine-tuning. To address these issues, we propose LoLDU, a Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) approach that significantly reduces trainable parameters by 2600 times compared to regular PEFT methods while maintaining comparable performance. LoLDU leverages Lower-Diag-Upper Decomposition (LDU) to initialize low-rank matrices for faster convergence and orthogonality. We focus on optimizing the diagonal matrix for scaling transformations. To the best of our knowledge, LoLDU has the fewest parameters among all PEFT approaches. We conducted extensive experiments across 4 instruction-following datasets, 6 natural language understanding (NLU) datasets, 8 image classification datasets, and image generation datasets with multiple model types (LLaMA2, RoBERTa, ViT, and Stable Diffusion), providing a comprehensive and detailed analysis. Our open-source code can be accessed at https://github.com/SKDDJ/LoLDU{https://github.com/SKDDJ/LoLDU}.

Effectiveness of Data Augmentation for Parameter Efficient Tuning with Limited Data

Recent work has demonstrated that using parameter efficient tuning techniques such as prefix tuning (or P-tuning) on pretrained language models can yield performance that is comparable or superior to fine-tuning while dramatically reducing trainable parameters. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such methods under the context of data augmentation, a common strategy to improve learning under low data regimes, has not been fully explored. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of several popular task-agnostic data augmentation techniques, i.e., EDA, Back Translation, and Mixup, when using two general parameter efficient tuning methods, P-tuning v2 and LoRA, under data scarcity. We show that data augmentation can be used to boost the performance of P-tuning and LoRA models, but the effectiveness of each technique varies and certain methods can lead to a notable degradation in performance, particularly when using larger models and on harder tasks. We further analyze the sentence representations of P-tuning compared to fine-tuning to help understand the above behaviour, and reveal how P-tuning generally presents a more limited ability to separate the sentence embeddings from different classes of augmented data. In addition, it displays poorer performance on heavily altered data. However, we demonstrate that by adding a simple contrastive loss function it can help mitigate such issues for prefix tuning, resulting in sizable improvements to augmented data performance.

Imagination Augmented Generation: Learning to Imagine Richer Context for Question Answering over Large Language Models

Retrieval-Augmented-Generation and Gener-ation-Augmented-Generation have been proposed to enhance the knowledge required for question answering over Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the former depends on external resources, and both require incorporating the explicit documents into the context, which results in longer contexts that lead to more resource consumption. Recent works indicate that LLMs have modeled rich knowledge, albeit not effectively triggered or activated. Inspired by this, we propose a novel knowledge-augmented framework, Imagination-Augmented-Generation (IAG), which simulates the human capacity to compensate for knowledge deficits while answering questions solely through imagination, without relying on external resources. Guided by IAG, we propose an imagine richer context method for question answering (IMcQA), which obtains richer context through the following two modules: explicit imagination by generating a short dummy document with long context compress and implicit imagination with HyperNetwork for generating adapter weights. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that IMcQA exhibits significant advantages in both open-domain and closed-book settings, as well as in both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalizations. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/IAG.

DiffuseKronA: A Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning Method for Personalized Diffusion Model

In the realm of subject-driven text-to-image (T2I) generative models, recent developments like DreamBooth and BLIP-Diffusion have led to impressive results yet encounter limitations due to their intensive fine-tuning demands and substantial parameter requirements. While the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) module within DreamBooth offers a reduction in trainable parameters, it introduces a pronounced sensitivity to hyperparameters, leading to a compromise between parameter efficiency and the quality of T2I personalized image synthesis. Addressing these constraints, we introduce \textit{DiffuseKronA}, a novel Kronecker product-based adaptation module that not only significantly reduces the parameter count by 35\% and 99.947\% compared to LoRA-DreamBooth and the original DreamBooth, respectively, but also enhances the quality of image synthesis. Crucially, DiffuseKronA mitigates the issue of hyperparameter sensitivity, delivering consistent high-quality generations across a wide range of hyperparameters, thereby diminishing the necessity for extensive fine-tuning. Furthermore, a more controllable decomposition makes DiffuseKronA more interpretable and even can achieve up to a 50\% reduction with results comparable to LoRA-Dreambooth. Evaluated against diverse and complex input images and text prompts, DiffuseKronA consistently outperforms existing models, producing diverse images of higher quality with improved fidelity and a more accurate color distribution of objects, all the while upholding exceptional parameter efficiency, thus presenting a substantial advancement in the field of T2I generative modeling. Our project page, consisting of links to the code, and pre-trained checkpoints, is available at https://diffusekrona.github.io/{https://diffusekrona.github.io/}.

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

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.

RandLoRA: Full-rank parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large models

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.

Tracking Meets LoRA: Faster Training, Larger Model, Stronger Performance

Motivated by the Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) in large language models, we propose LoRAT, a method that unveils the power of large ViT model for tracking within laboratory-level resources. The essence of our work lies in adapting LoRA, a technique that fine-tunes a small subset of model parameters without adding inference latency, to the domain of visual tracking. However, unique challenges and potential domain gaps make this transfer not as easy as the first intuition. Firstly, a transformer-based tracker constructs unshared position embedding for template and search image. This poses a challenge for the transfer of LoRA, usually requiring consistency in the design when applied to the pre-trained backbone, to downstream tasks. Secondly, the inductive bias inherent in convolutional heads diminishes the effectiveness of parameter-efficient fine-tuning in tracking models. To overcome these limitations, we first decouple the position embeddings in transformer-based trackers into shared spatial ones and independent type ones. The shared embeddings, which describe the absolute coordinates of multi-resolution images (namely, the template and search images), are inherited from the pre-trained backbones. In contrast, the independent embeddings indicate the sources of each token and are learned from scratch. Furthermore, we design an anchor-free head solely based on MLP to adapt PETR, enabling better performance with less computational overhead. With our design, 1) it becomes practical to train trackers with the ViT-g backbone on GPUs with only memory of 25.8GB (batch size of 16); 2) we reduce the training time of the L-224 variant from 35.0 to 10.8 GPU hours; 3) we improve the LaSOT SUC score from 0.703 to 0.742 with the L-224 variant; 4) we fast the inference speed of the L-224 variant from 52 to 119 FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/LitingLin/LoRAT.

LoRA-GGPO: Mitigating Double Descent in LoRA Fine-Tuning via Gradient-Guided Perturbation Optimization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing, but their full fine-tuning remains resource-intensive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), have emerged as a practical solution by approximating parameter updates with low-rank matrices. However, LoRA often exhibits a "double descent" phenomenon during fine-tuning, where model performance degrades due to overfitting and limited expressiveness caused by low-rank constraints. To address this issue, we propose LoRA-GGPO (Gradient-Guided Perturbation Optimization), a novel method that leverages gradient and weight norms to generate targeted perturbations. By optimizing the sharpness of the loss landscape, LoRA-GGPO guides the model toward flatter minima, mitigating the double descent problem and improving generalization. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks demonstrate that LoRA-GGPO outperforms LoRA and its state-of-the-art variants. Furthermore, extended experiments specifically designed to analyze the double descent phenomenon confirm that LoRA-GGPO effectively alleviates this issue, producing more robust and generalizable models. Our work provides a robust and efficient solution for fine-tuning LLMs, with broad applicability in real-world scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/llm172/LoRA-GGPO.

In-Context LoRA for Diffusion Transformers

Recent research arXiv:2410.15027 has explored the use of diffusion transformers (DiTs) for task-agnostic image generation by simply concatenating attention tokens across images. However, despite substantial computational resources, the fidelity of the generated images remains suboptimal. In this study, we reevaluate and streamline this framework by hypothesizing that text-to-image DiTs inherently possess in-context generation capabilities, requiring only minimal tuning to activate them. Through diverse task experiments, we qualitatively demonstrate that existing text-to-image DiTs can effectively perform in-context generation without any tuning. Building on this insight, we propose a remarkably simple pipeline to leverage the in-context abilities of DiTs: (1) concatenate images instead of tokens, (2) perform joint captioning of multiple images, and (3) apply task-specific LoRA tuning using small datasets (e.g., 20sim 100 samples) instead of full-parameter tuning with large datasets. We name our models In-Context LoRA (IC-LoRA). This approach requires no modifications to the original DiT models, only changes to the training data. Remarkably, our pipeline generates high-fidelity image sets that better adhere to prompts. While task-specific in terms of tuning data, our framework remains task-agnostic in architecture and pipeline, offering a powerful tool for the community and providing valuable insights for further research on product-level task-agnostic generation systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://github.com/ali-vilab/In-Context-LoRA

STAR: Constraint LoRA with Dynamic Active Learning for Data-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

Though Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the powerful capabilities of few-shot learning through prompting methods, supervised training is still necessary for complex reasoning tasks. Because of their extensive parameters and memory consumption, both Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods and Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods have been proposed for LLMs. Nevertheless, the issue of large annotated data consumption, the aim of Data-Efficient Fine-Tuning, remains unexplored. One obvious way is to combine the PEFT method with active learning. However, the experimental results show that such a combination is not trivial and yields inferior results. Through probe experiments, such observation might be explained by two main reasons: uncertainty gap and poor model calibration. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to effectively integrate uncertainty-based active learning and LoRA. Specifically, for the uncertainty gap, we introduce a dynamic uncertainty measurement that combines the uncertainty of the base model and the uncertainty of the full model during the iteration of active learning. For poor model calibration, we incorporate the regularization method during LoRA training to keep the model from being over-confident, and the Monte-Carlo dropout mechanism is employed to enhance the uncertainty estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing baseline models on three complex reasoning tasks.

Analyzing and Reducing Catastrophic Forgetting in Parameter Efficient Tuning

Existing research has shown that large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance in language understanding and generation. However, when LLMs are continuously fine-tuned on complex and diverse domain-specific downstream tasks, the inference performance on historical tasks decreases dramatically, which is known as a catastrophic forgetting problem. A trade-off needs to be kept between learning plasticity and memory stability. Plenty of existing works have explored strategies like memory replay, regularization and parameter isolation, but little is known about the geometric connection of various adjacent minima in the continual LLMs fine-tuning scenarios. In this work, we investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which means different minima can be connected by a low-loss valley. Through extensive experiments, we uncover the mode connectivity phenomenon in the LLMs continual learning scenario and find that it can strike a balance between plasticity and stability. Building upon these findings, we propose a simple yet effective method called Interpolation-based LoRA (I-LoRA), which constructs a dual-memory experience replay framework based on LoRA parameter interpolations. Extensive experiments and analysis on eight domain-specific CL benchmarks demonstrate that I-LoRA consistently show significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art approaches with up to 11% performance gains, providing a strong baseline and insights for future research on the large language model continual learning problem. Our code is available at https://github.com/which47/LLMCL.

LoRA-FAIR: Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Aggregation and Initialization Refinement

Foundation models (FMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks with task-specific fine-tuning, yet full parameter fine-tuning is often computationally prohibitive for large models. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) reduce this cost by introducing low-rank matrices for tuning fewer parameters. While LoRA allows for efficient fine-tuning, it requires significant data for adaptation, making Federated Learning (FL) an appealing solution due to its privacy-preserving collaborative framework. However, combining LoRA with FL introduces two key challenges: the Server-Side LoRA Aggregation Bias, where server-side averaging of LoRA matrices diverges from the ideal global update, and the Client-Side LoRA Initialization Drift, emphasizing the need for consistent initialization across rounds. Existing approaches address these challenges individually, limiting their effectiveness. We propose LoRA-FAIR, a novel method that tackles both issues by introducing a correction term on the server while keeping the original LoRA modules, enhancing aggregation efficiency and accuracy. LoRA-FAIR maintains computational and communication efficiency, yielding superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results on ViT and MLP-Mixer models across large-scale datasets demonstrate that LoRA-FAIR consistently achieves performance improvements in FL settings.

AnyRefill: A Unified, Data-Efficient Framework for Left-Prompt-Guided Vision Tasks

In this paper, we present a novel Left-Prompt-Guided (LPG) paradigm to address a diverse range of reference-based vision tasks. Inspired by the human creative process, we reformulate these tasks using a left-right stitching formulation to construct contextual input. Building upon this foundation, we propose AnyRefill, an extension of LeftRefill, that effectively adapts Text-to-Image (T2I) models to various vision tasks. AnyRefill leverages the inpainting priors of advanced T2I model based on the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, and incorporates flexible components to enhance its capabilities. By combining task-specific LoRAs with the stitching input, AnyRefill unlocks its potential across diverse tasks, including conditional generation, visual perception, and image editing, without requiring additional visual encoders. Meanwhile, AnyRefill exhibits remarkable data efficiency, requiring minimal task-specific fine-tuning while maintaining high generative performance. Through extensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that AnyRefill outperforms other image condition injection methods and achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art open-source methods. Notably, AnyRefill delivers results comparable to advanced commercial tools, such as IC-Light and SeedEdit, even in challenging scenarios. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies across versatile tasks validate the strong generation of the proposed simple yet effective LPG formulation, establishing AnyRefill as a unified, highly data-efficient solution for reference-based vision tasks.

Towards Robust and Parameter-Efficient Knowledge Unlearning for LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and memorization capabilities via pretraining on massive textual corpora. However, this poses risk of privacy and copyright violations, highlighting the need for efficient machine unlearning methods that remove sensitive data without retraining from scratch. While Gradient Ascent (GA) is commonly used to unlearn by reducing the likelihood of generating unwanted content, it leads to unstable optimization and catastrophic forgetting of retrained knowledge. We find that combining GA with low-rank adaptation results in poor trade-offs between computational cost and generative performance. To address these challenges, we propose Low-rank Knowledge Unlearning (LoKU), a novel framework that enables robust and efficient unlearning for LLMs. First, we introduce Inverted Hinge Loss, which suppresses unwanted tokens while maintaining fluency by boosting the probability of the next most likely token. Second, we develop a data-adaptive initialization for LoRA adapters via low-rank approximation weighted with relative Fisher information, thereby focusing updates on parameters critical for removing targeted knowledge. Experiments on the Training Data Extraction Challenge dataset using GPT-Neo models as well as on the TOFU benchmark with Phi-1.5B and Llama2-7B models demonstrate that our approach effectively removes sensitive information while maintaining reasoning and generative capabilities with minimal impact. Our implementation can be found in https://github.com/csm9493/efficient-llm-unlearning.

Step1X-3D: Towards High-Fidelity and Controllable Generation of Textured 3D Assets

While generative artificial intelligence has advanced significantly across text, image, audio, and video domains, 3D generation remains comparatively underdeveloped due to fundamental challenges such as data scarcity, algorithmic limitations, and ecosystem fragmentation. To this end, we present Step1X-3D, an open framework addressing these challenges through: (1) a rigorous data curation pipeline processing >5M assets to create a 2M high-quality dataset with standardized geometric and textural properties; (2) a two-stage 3D-native architecture combining a hybrid VAE-DiT geometry generator with an diffusion-based texture synthesis module; and (3) the full open-source release of models, training code, and adaptation modules. For geometry generation, the hybrid VAE-DiT component produces TSDF representations by employing perceiver-based latent encoding with sharp edge sampling for detail preservation. The diffusion-based texture synthesis module then ensures cross-view consistency through geometric conditioning and latent-space synchronization. Benchmark results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance that exceeds existing open-source methods, while also achieving competitive quality with proprietary solutions. Notably, the framework uniquely bridges the 2D and 3D generation paradigms by supporting direct transfer of 2D control techniques~(e.g., LoRA) to 3D synthesis. By simultaneously advancing data quality, algorithmic fidelity, and reproducibility, Step1X-3D aims to establish new standards for open research in controllable 3D asset generation.

Retrieval Augmented Generation and Understanding in Vision: A Survey and New Outlook

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal technique in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by enabling access to external, reliable, and up-to-date knowledge sources. In the context of AI-Generated Content (AIGC), RAG has proven invaluable by augmenting model outputs with supplementary, relevant information, thus improving their quality. Recently, the potential of RAG has extended beyond natural language processing, with emerging methods integrating retrieval-augmented strategies into the computer vision (CV) domain. These approaches aim to address the limitations of relying solely on internal model knowledge by incorporating authoritative external knowledge bases, thereby improving both the understanding and generation capabilities of vision models. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the current state of retrieval-augmented techniques in CV, focusing on two main areas: (I) visual understanding and (II) visual generation. In the realm of visual understanding, we systematically review tasks ranging from basic image recognition to complex applications such as medical report generation and multimodal question answering. For visual content generation, we examine the application of RAG in tasks related to image, video, and 3D generation. Furthermore, we explore recent advancements in RAG for embodied AI, with a particular focus on applications in planning, task execution, multimodal perception, interaction, and specialized domains. Given that the integration of retrieval-augmented techniques in CV is still in its early stages, we also highlight the key limitations of current approaches and propose future research directions to drive the development of this promising area.

Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models for Text-to-Image Generation through Autoregressive Representation Alignment

We present Autoregressive Representation Alignment (ARRA), a new training framework that unlocks global-coherent text-to-image generation in autoregressive LLMs without architectural changes. Unlike prior work that requires complex architectural redesigns, ARRA aligns LLM hidden states with visual representations from external visual foundational models via a global visual alignment loss and a hybrid token, <HYBNEXT>. This token enforces dual constraints: local next-token prediction and global semantic distillation, enabling LLMs to implicitly learn spatial and contextual coherence while retaining their original autoregressive paradigm. Extensive experiments validate ARRA's plug-and-play versatility. When training from text-generation-only LLMs or random initialization, ARRA reduces FID by 25.5% (MIMIC-CXR), 8.8% (DeepEyeNet), and 7.5% (ImageNet) for advanced autoregressive LLMs like Chameleon and LlamaGen, all without framework modifications. For domain adaption, ARRA aligns general-purpose LLMs with specialized models (e.g., BioMedCLIP), achieving an 18.6% FID reduction over direct fine-tuning on medical imaging (MIMIC-CXR). By demonstrating that training objective redesign -- not just architectural innovation -- can resolve cross-modal global coherence challenges, ARRA offers a complementary paradigm for advancing autoregressive models. Code and models will be released to advance autoregressive image generation.

NOLA: Networks as Linear Combination of Low Rank Random Basis

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained popularity due to their impressive few-shot performance across various downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning all parameters and storing a unique model for each downstream task or domain becomes impractical because of the massive size of checkpoints (e.g., 350GB in GPT-3). Current literature, such as LoRA, showcases the potential of low-rank modifications to the original weights of an LLM, enabling efficient adaptation and storage for task-specific models. These methods can reduce the number of parameters needed to fine-tune an LLM by several orders of magnitude. Yet, these methods face two primary limitations: 1) the parameter reduction is lower-bounded by the rank one decomposition, and 2) the extent of reduction is heavily influenced by both the model architecture and the chosen rank. For instance, in larger models, even a rank one decomposition might exceed the number of parameters truly needed for adaptation. In this paper, we introduce NOLA, which overcomes the rank one lower bound present in LoRA. It achieves this by re-parameterizing the low-rank matrices in LoRA using linear combinations of randomly generated matrices (basis) and optimizing the linear mixture coefficients only. This approach allows us to decouple the number of trainable parameters from both the choice of rank and the network architecture. We present adaptation results using GPT-2 and ViT in natural language and computer vision tasks. NOLA performs as well as, or better than models with equivalent parameter counts. Furthermore, we demonstrate that we can halve the parameters in larger models compared to LoRA with rank one, without sacrificing performance.

LoRAPrune: Pruning Meets Low-Rank Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Large pre-trained models (LPMs), such as LLaMA and GLM, have shown exceptional performance across various tasks through fine-tuning. Although low-rank adaption (LoRA) has emerged to cheaply fine-tune these LPMs on downstream tasks, their deployment is still hindered by the vast model scale and computational costs. Neural network pruning offers a way to compress LPMs. However, the current pruning methods designed for LPMs are not compatible with LoRA. This is due to their utilization of unstructured pruning on LPMs, impeding the merging of LoRA weights, or their dependence on the gradients of pre-trained weights to guide pruning, which can impose significant memory overhead. To this end, we propose LoRAPrune, a new framework that delivers an accurate, compact model for efficient inference in a highly memory-effective manner. Specifically, we first design a LoRA-guided pruning criterion, which uses the weights and gradients of LoRA, rather than the gradients of pre-trained weights for importance estimation. We then propose a structured iterative pruning procedure, to remove redundant channels and heads. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our LoRAPrune over existing approaches on the LLaMA series models. For instance, at a 50\% compression rate, LoRAPrune outperforms LLM-Pruner by a perplexity reduction of 8.0 on WikiText2 and 16.05 on PTB datasets, while concurrently reducing memory usage by 52.6\%. The code will be released after review

S-LoRA: Serving Thousands of Concurrent LoRA Adapters

The "pretrain-then-finetune" paradigm is commonly adopted in the deployment of large language models. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, is often employed to adapt a base model to a multitude of tasks, resulting in a substantial collection of LoRA adapters derived from one base model. We observe that this paradigm presents significant opportunities for batched inference during serving. To capitalize on these opportunities, we present S-LoRA, a system designed for the scalable serving of many LoRA adapters. S-LoRA stores all adapters in the main memory and fetches the adapters used by the currently running queries to the GPU memory. To efficiently use the GPU memory and reduce fragmentation, S-LoRA proposes Unified Paging. Unified Paging uses a unified memory pool to manage dynamic adapter weights with different ranks and KV cache tensors with varying sequence lengths. Additionally, S-LoRA employs a novel tensor parallelism strategy and highly optimized custom CUDA kernels for heterogeneous batching of LoRA computation. Collectively, these features enable S-LoRA to serve thousands of LoRA adapters on a single GPU or across multiple GPUs with a small overhead. Compared to state-of-the-art libraries such as HuggingFace PEFT and vLLM (with naive support of LoRA serving), S-LoRA can improve the throughput by up to 4 times and increase the number of served adapters by several orders of magnitude. As a result, S-LoRA enables scalable serving of many task-specific fine-tuned models and offers the potential for large-scale customized fine-tuning services.

StoryMaker: Towards Holistic Consistent Characters in Text-to-image Generation

Tuning-free personalized image generation methods have achieved significant success in maintaining facial consistency, i.e., identities, even with multiple characters. However, the lack of holistic consistency in scenes with multiple characters hampers these methods' ability to create a cohesive narrative. In this paper, we introduce StoryMaker, a personalization solution that preserves not only facial consistency but also clothing, hairstyles, and body consistency, thus facilitating the creation of a story through a series of images. StoryMaker incorporates conditions based on face identities and cropped character images, which include clothing, hairstyles, and bodies. Specifically, we integrate the facial identity information with the cropped character images using the Positional-aware Perceiver Resampler (PPR) to obtain distinct character features. To prevent intermingling of multiple characters and the background, we separately constrain the cross-attention impact regions of different characters and the background using MSE loss with segmentation masks. Additionally, we train the generation network conditioned on poses to promote decoupling from poses. A LoRA is also employed to enhance fidelity and quality. Experiments underscore the effectiveness of our approach. StoryMaker supports numerous applications and is compatible with other societal plug-ins. Our source codes and model weights are available at https://github.com/RedAIGC/StoryMaker.

Evaluating small vision-language models as AI assistants for radio astronomical source analysis tasks

The advent of next-generation radio telescopes is set to transform radio astronomy by producing massive data volumes that challenge traditional processing methods. Deep learning techniques have shown strong potential in automating radio analysis tasks, yet are often constrained by the limited availability of large annotated datasets. Recent progress in self-supervised learning has led to foundational radio vision models, but adapting them for new tasks typically requires coding expertise, limiting their accessibility to a broader astronomical community. Text-based AI interfaces offer a promising alternative by enabling task-specific queries and example-driven learning. In this context, Large Language Models (LLMs), with their remarkable zero-shot capabilities, are increasingly used in scientific domains. However, deploying large-scale models remains resource-intensive, and there is a growing demand for AI systems that can reason over both visual and textual data in astronomical analysis. This study explores small-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as AI assistants for radio astronomy, combining LLM capabilities with vision transformers. We fine-tuned the LLaVA VLM on a dataset of 59k radio images from multiple surveys, enriched with 38k image-caption pairs from the literature. The fine-tuned models show clear improvements over base models in radio-specific tasks, achieving ~30% F1-score gains in extended source detection, but they underperform pure vision models and exhibit ~20% drop on general multimodal tasks. Inclusion of caption data and LoRA fine-tuning enhances instruction-following and helps recover ~10% accuracy on standard benchmarks. This work lays the foundation for future advancements in radio VLMs, highlighting their potential and limitations, such as the need for better multimodal alignment, higher-quality datasets, and mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Model through Boosting Vision Capabilities

We focus on improving the visual understanding capability for boosting the vision-language models. We propose Arcana, a multiModal language model, which introduces two crucial techniques. First, we present Multimodal LoRA (MM-LoRA), a module designed to enhance the decoder. Unlike traditional language-driven decoders, MM-LoRA consists of two parallel LoRAs -- one for vision and one for language -- each with its own parameters. This disentangled parameters design allows for more specialized learning in each modality and better integration of multimodal information. Second, we introduce the Query Ladder adapter (QLadder) to improve the visual encoder. QLadder employs a learnable ``ladder'' structure to deeply aggregates the intermediate representations from the frozen pretrained visual encoder (e.g., CLIP image encoder). This enables the model to learn new and informative visual features, as well as remaining the powerful capabilities of the pretrained visual encoder. These techniques collectively enhance Arcana's visual perception power, enabling it to leverage improved visual information for more accurate and contextually relevant outputs across various multimodal scenarios. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capability of our Arcana. The code and re-annotated data are available at https://arcana-project-page.github.io.

MeteoRA: Multiple-tasks Embedded LoRA for Large Language Models

The pretrain+fine-tune paradigm is foundational in deploying large language models (LLMs) across a diverse range of downstream applications. Among these, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out for its parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), producing numerous off-the-shelf task-specific LoRA adapters. However, this approach requires explicit task intention selection, posing challenges for automatic task sensing and switching during inference with multiple existing LoRA adapters embedded in a single LLM. In this work, we introduce MeteoRA (Multiple-Tasks embedded LoRA), a scalable multi-knowledge LoRA fusion framework designed for LLMs. MeteoRA integrates various LoRA adapters in a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) style into the base LLM, enabling the model to automatically select the most pertinent adapter based on the task input. This advancement significantly enhances the LLM's capability to handle composite tasks that require different adapters to solve various components of the problem. Our evaluations, featuring the LlaMA2-13B and LlaMA3-8B base models equipped with off-the-shelf 28 LoRA adapters through MeteoRA, demonstrate equivalent performance with the individual adapters. Furthermore, both base models equipped with MeteoRA achieve superior performance in sequentially solving composite tasks with ten problems in only a single inference process, highlighting the ability of timely intention switching in MeteoRA embedded LLMs.

Sparse Low-rank Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models in a parameter-efficient manner is widely studied for its effectiveness and efficiency. The popular method of low-rank adaptation (LoRA) offers a notable approach, hypothesizing that the adaptation process is intrinsically low-dimensional. Although LoRA has demonstrated commendable performance, it is implemented with a fixed and unalterable intrinsic rank that might not always be the ideal choice. Recognizing the need for more flexible adaptation, we extend the methodology of LoRA to an innovative approach we call sparse low-rank adaptation (SoRA) that enables dynamic adjustments to the intrinsic rank during the adaptation process. We achieve this through the incorporation of a gate unit optimized with proximal gradient method in the training stage, controlling the cardinality of rank under the sparsity of the gate. In the subsequent inference stage, we eliminate the parameter blocks corresponding to the zeroed-out ranks, to reduce each SoRA module back to a concise yet rank-optimal LoRA. Our approach strengthens the representation power of LoRA by initializing it with a higher rank, while efficiently taming a temporarily increased number of parameters via updating in a sparse way. We further introduce a sparsifying scheduler for SoRA, aiming to examine the impact of the number of non-zero parameters on the model's memorization and generalization. Our experimental results demonstrate that SoRA can outperform other baselines even with 70% retained parameters and 70% training time.

KaSA: Knowledge-Aware Singular-Value Adaptation of Large Language Models

The increasing sizes of large language models (LLMs) result in significant computational overhead and memory usage when adapting these models to specific tasks or domains. Various parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been devised to mitigate these challenges by training a small set of parameters for the task-specific updates of the model weights. Among PEFT methods, LoRA stands out for its simplicity and efficiency, inspiring the development of a series of variants. However, LoRA and its successors disregard the knowledge that is noisy or irrelevant to the targeted task, detrimentally impacting model performance and leading to suboptimality. To address this limitation, we introduce Knowledge-aware Singular-value Adaptation (KaSA), a PEFT method that leverages singular value decomposition (SVD) with knowledge-aware singular values to dynamically activate knowledge based on its relevance to the task at hand. We conduct extensive experiments across a range of LLMs on tasks spanning natural language understanding (NLU), generation (NLG), instruction following, and commonsense reasoning. The experimental results demonstrate that KaSA consistently outperforms FFT and 14 popular PEFT baselines across 16 benchmarks and 4 synthetic datasets, underscoring our method's efficacy and adaptability. The source code of our method is available at https://github.com/juyongjiang/KaSA.

FLoRA: Federated Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with Heterogeneous Low-Rank Adaptations

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been pivotal in advancing AI, with pre-trained LLMs being adaptable to diverse downstream tasks through fine-tuning. Federated learning (FL) further enhances fine-tuning in a privacy-aware manner by utilizing clients' local data through in-situ computation, eliminating the need for data movement. However, fine-tuning LLMs, given their massive scale of parameters, poses challenges for clients with constrained and heterogeneous resources in FL. Previous methods employed low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for efficient federated fine-tuning but utilized traditional FL aggregation strategies on LoRA adapters. These approaches led to mathematically inaccurate aggregation noise, reducing fine-tuning effectiveness and failing to address heterogeneous LoRAs. In this work, we first highlight the mathematical incorrectness of LoRA aggregation in existing federated fine-tuning methods. We introduce a new approach called FLORA that enables federated fine-tuning on heterogeneous LoRA adapters across clients through a novel stacking-based aggregation method. Our approach is noise-free and seamlessly supports heterogeneous LoRA adapters. Extensive experiments demonstrate FLORA' s superior performance in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. We envision this work as a milestone for efficient, privacy-preserving, and accurate federated fine-tuning of LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/ATP-1010/FederatedLLM.

Each Rank Could be an Expert: Single-Ranked Mixture of Experts LoRA for Multi-Task Learning

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used for adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains due to its efficiency and modularity. Meanwhile, vanilla LoRA struggles with task conflicts in multi-task scenarios. Recent works adopt Mixture of Experts (MoE) by treating each LoRA module as an expert, thereby mitigating task interference through multiple specialized LoRA modules. While effective, these methods often isolate knowledge within individual tasks, failing to fully exploit the shared knowledge across related tasks. In this paper, we establish a connection between single LoRA and multi-LoRA MoE, integrating them into a unified framework. We demonstrate that the dynamic routing of multiple LoRAs is functionally equivalent to rank partitioning and block-level activation within a single LoRA. We further empirically demonstrate that finer-grained LoRA partitioning, within the same total and activated parameter constraints, leads to better performance gains across heterogeneous tasks. Building on these findings, we propose Single-ranked Mixture of Experts LoRA (SMoRA), which embeds MoE into LoRA by treating each rank as an independent expert. With a dynamic rank-wise activation mechanism, SMoRA promotes finer-grained knowledge sharing while mitigating task conflicts. Experiments demonstrate that SMoRA activates fewer parameters yet achieves better performance in multi-task scenarios.

Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a promising approach for mitigating the hallucination of large language models (LLMs). However, existing research lacks rigorous evaluation of the impact of retrieval-augmented generation on different large language models, which make it challenging to identify the potential bottlenecks in the capabilities of RAG for different LLMs. In this paper, we systematically investigate the impact of Retrieval-Augmented Generation on large language models. We analyze the performance of different large language models in 4 fundamental abilities required for RAG, including noise robustness, negative rejection, information integration, and counterfactual robustness. To this end, we establish Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmark (RGB), a new corpus for RAG evaluation in both English and Chinese. RGB divides the instances within the benchmark into 4 separate testbeds based on the aforementioned fundamental abilities required to resolve the case. Then we evaluate 6 representative LLMs on RGB to diagnose the challenges of current LLMs when applying RAG. Evaluation reveals that while LLMs exhibit a certain degree of noise robustness, they still struggle significantly in terms of negative rejection, information integration, and dealing with false information. The aforementioned assessment outcomes indicate that there is still a considerable journey ahead to effectively apply RAG to LLMs.

Meta Knowledge for Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique used to augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with contextually relevant, time-critical, or domain-specific information without altering the underlying model parameters. However, constructing RAG systems that can effectively synthesize information from large and diverse set of documents remains a significant challenge. We introduce a novel data-centric RAG workflow for LLMs, transforming the traditional retrieve-then-read system into a more advanced prepare-then-rewrite-then-retrieve-then-read framework, to achieve higher domain expert-level understanding of the knowledge base. Our methodology relies on generating metadata and synthetic Questions and Answers (QA) for each document, as well as introducing the new concept of Meta Knowledge Summary (MK Summary) for metadata-based clusters of documents. The proposed innovations enable personalized user-query augmentation and in-depth information retrieval across the knowledge base. Our research makes two significant contributions: using LLMs as evaluators and employing new comparative performance metrics, we demonstrate that (1) using augmented queries with synthetic question matching significantly outperforms traditional RAG pipelines that rely on document chunking (p < 0.01), and (2) meta knowledge-augmented queries additionally significantly improve retrieval precision and recall, as well as the final answers breadth, depth, relevancy, and specificity. Our methodology is cost-effective, costing less than $20 per 2000 research papers using Claude 3 Haiku, and can be adapted with any fine-tuning of either the language or embedding models to further enhance the performance of end-to-end RAG pipelines.

Heavy Labels Out! Dataset Distillation with Label Space Lightening

Dataset distillation or condensation aims to condense a large-scale training dataset into a much smaller synthetic one such that the training performance of distilled and original sets on neural networks are similar. Although the number of training samples can be reduced substantially, current state-of-the-art methods heavily rely on enormous soft labels to achieve satisfactory performance. As a result, the required storage can be comparable even to original datasets, especially for large-scale ones. To solve this problem, instead of storing these heavy labels, we propose a novel label-lightening framework termed HeLlO aiming at effective image-to-label projectors, with which synthetic labels can be directly generated online from synthetic images. Specifically, to construct such projectors, we leverage prior knowledge in open-source foundation models, e.g., CLIP, and introduce a LoRA-like fine-tuning strategy to mitigate the gap between pre-trained and target distributions, so that original models for soft-label generation can be distilled into a group of low-rank matrices. Moreover, an effective image optimization method is proposed to further mitigate the potential error between the original and distilled label generators. Extensive experiments demonstrate that with only about 0.003% of the original storage required for a complete set of soft labels, we achieve comparable performance to current state-of-the-art dataset distillation methods on large-scale datasets. Our code will be available.

Train Small, Infer Large: Memory-Efficient LoRA Training for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing with exceptional task generalization capabilities. Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) offers a cost-effective fine-tuning solution, freezing the original model parameters and training only lightweight, low-rank adapter matrices. However, the memory footprint of LoRA is largely dominated by the original model parameters. To mitigate this, we propose LoRAM, a memory-efficient LoRA training scheme founded on the intuition that many neurons in over-parameterized LLMs have low training utility but are essential for inference. LoRAM presents a unique twist: it trains on a pruned (small) model to obtain pruned low-rank matrices, which are then recovered and utilized with the original (large) model for inference. Additionally, minimal-cost continual pre-training, performed by the model publishers in advance, aligns the knowledge discrepancy between pruned and original models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of LoRAM across various pruning strategies and downstream tasks. For a model with 70 billion parameters, LoRAM enables training on a GPU with only 20G HBM, replacing an A100-80G GPU for LoRA training and 15 GPUs for full fine-tuning. Specifically, QLoRAM implemented by structured pruning combined with 4-bit quantization, for LLaMA-3.1-70B (LLaMA-2-70B), reduces the parameter storage cost that dominates the memory usage in low-rank matrix training by 15.81times (16.95times), while achieving dominant performance gains over both the original LLaMA-3.1-70B (LLaMA-2-70B) and LoRA-trained LLaMA-3.1-8B (LLaMA-2-13B).

Planting a SEED of Vision in Large Language Model

We present SEED, an elaborate image tokenizer that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the emergent ability to SEE and Draw at the same time. Research on image tokenizers has previously reached an impasse, as frameworks employing quantized visual tokens have lost prominence due to subpar performance and convergence in multimodal comprehension (compared to BLIP-2, etc.) or generation (compared to Stable Diffusion, etc.). Despite the limitations, we remain confident in its natural capacity to unify visual and textual representations, facilitating scalable multimodal training with LLM's original recipe. In this study, we identify two crucial principles for the architecture and training of SEED that effectively ease subsequent alignment with LLMs. (1) Image tokens should be independent of 2D physical patch positions and instead be produced with a 1D causal dependency, exhibiting intrinsic interdependence that aligns with the left-to-right autoregressive prediction mechanism in LLMs. (2) Image tokens should capture high-level semantics consistent with the degree of semantic abstraction in words, and be optimized for both discriminativeness and reconstruction during the tokenizer training phase. As a result, the off-the-shelf LLM is able to perform both image-to-text and text-to-image generation by incorporating our SEED through efficient LoRA tuning. Comprehensive multimodal pretraining and instruction tuning, which may yield improved results, are reserved for future investigation. This version of SEED was trained in 5.7 days using only 64 V100 GPUs and 5M publicly available image-text pairs. Our preliminary study emphasizes the great potential of discrete visual tokens in versatile multimodal LLMs and the importance of proper image tokenizers in broader research.

VFX Creator: Animated Visual Effect Generation with Controllable Diffusion Transformer

Crafting magic and illusions is one of the most thrilling aspects of filmmaking, with visual effects (VFX) serving as the powerhouse behind unforgettable cinematic experiences. While recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have driven progress in generic image and video synthesis, the domain of controllable VFX generation remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm for animated VFX generation as image animation, where dynamic effects are generated from user-friendly textual descriptions and static reference images. Our work makes two primary contributions: (i) Open-VFX, the first high-quality VFX video dataset spanning 15 diverse effect categories, annotated with textual descriptions, instance segmentation masks for spatial conditioning, and start-end timestamps for temporal control. (ii) VFX Creator, a simple yet effective controllable VFX generation framework based on a Video Diffusion Transformer. The model incorporates a spatial and temporal controllable LoRA adapter, requiring minimal training videos. Specifically, a plug-and-play mask control module enables instance-level spatial manipulation, while tokenized start-end motion timestamps embedded in the diffusion process, alongside the text encoder, allow precise temporal control over effect timing and pace. Extensive experiments on the Open-VFX test set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system in generating realistic and dynamic effects, achieving state-of-the-art performance and generalization ability in both spatial and temporal controllability. Furthermore, we introduce a specialized metric to evaluate the precision of temporal control. By bridging traditional VFX techniques with generative approaches, VFX Creator unlocks new possibilities for efficient and high-quality video effect generation, making advanced VFX accessible to a broader audience.

X-LoRA: Mixture of Low-Rank Adapter Experts, a Flexible Framework for Large Language Models with Applications in Protein Mechanics and Design

We report a mixture of expert strategy to create fine-tuned large language models using a deep layer-wise token-level approach based on low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Starting with a set of pre-trained LoRA adapters, we propose a gating strategy that uses the hidden states to dynamically mix adapted layers, allowing the resulting X-LoRA model to draw upon different capabilities and create never-before-used deep layer-wise combinations of adaptations are established to solve specific tasks. The design is inspired by the biological principles of universality and diversity, where neural network building blocks are reused in different hierarchical manifestations. Hence, the X-LoRA model can be easily implemented for any existing large language model (LLM) without a need for modifications of the underlying structure. We develop a tailored X-LoRA model that offers scientific capabilities including forward/inverse analysis tasks and enhanced reasoning capability, focused on biomaterial analysis, protein mechanics and design. The impact of this work include access to readily expandable, adaptable and changeable models with strong domain knowledge and the capability to integrate across areas of knowledge. With the X-LoRA model featuring experts in biology, mathematics, reasoning, bio-inspired materials, mechanics and materials, chemistry, and protein mechanics we conduct a series of physics-focused case studies. We examine knowledge recall, protein mechanics forward/inverse tasks, protein design, and adversarial agentic modeling including ontological knowledge graphs. The model is capable not only of making quantitative predictions of nanomechanical properties of proteins, but also reasons over the results and correctly predicts likely mechanisms that explain distinct molecular behaviors.

Towards Holistic Visual Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Videos: A LLM-Based Multi-Dimensional Evaluation Model

The development of AI-Generated Video (AIGV) technology has been remarkable in recent years, significantly transforming the paradigm of video content production. However, AIGVs still suffer from noticeable visual quality defects, such as noise, blurriness, frame jitter and low dynamic degree, which severely impact the user's viewing experience. Therefore, an effective automatic visual quality assessment is of great importance for AIGV content regulation and generative model improvement. In this work, we decompose the visual quality of AIGVs into three dimensions: technical quality, motion quality, and video semantics. For each dimension, we design corresponding encoder to achieve effective feature representation. Moreover, considering the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) in various vision and language tasks, we introduce a LLM as the quality regression module. To better enable the LLM to establish reasoning associations between multi-dimensional features and visual quality, we propose a specially designed multi-modal prompt engineering framework. Additionally, we incorporate LoRA fine-tuning technology during the training phase, allowing the LLM to better adapt to specific tasks. Our proposed method achieved second place in the NTIRE 2025 Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Content Challenge: Track 2 AI Generated video, demonstrating its effectiveness. Codes can be obtained at https://github.com/QiZelu/AIGVEval.

LPA3D: 3D Room-Level Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Images

Generating realistic, room-level indoor scenes with semantically plausible and detailed appearances from in-the-wild images is crucial for various applications in VR, AR, and robotics. The success of NeRF-based generative methods indicates a promising direction to address this challenge. However, unlike their success at the object level, existing scene-level generative methods require additional information, such as multiple views, depth images, or semantic guidance, rather than relying solely on RGB images. This is because NeRF-based methods necessitate prior knowledge of camera poses, which is challenging to approximate for indoor scenes due to the complexity of defining alignment and the difficulty of globally estimating poses from a single image, given the unseen parts behind the camera. To address this challenge, we redefine global poses within the framework of Local-Pose-Alignment (LPA) -- an anchor-based multi-local-coordinate system that uses a selected number of anchors as the roots of these coordinates. Building on this foundation, we introduce LPA-GAN, a novel NeRF-based generative approach that incorporates specific modifications to estimate the priors of camera poses under LPA. It also co-optimizes the pose predictor and scene generation processes. Our ablation study and comparisons with straightforward extensions of NeRF-based object generative methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, visual comparisons with other techniques reveal that our method achieves superior view-to-view consistency and semantic normality.

mRAG: Elucidating the Design Space of Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in multimodal tasks such as visual question answering, visual grounding, and complex reasoning. However, they remain limited by static training data, susceptibility to hallucinations, and inability to verify claims against up-to-date, external evidence, compromising their performance in dynamic real-world applications. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a practical solution to mitigate these challenges by allowing the LVLMs to access large-scale knowledge databases via retrieval mechanisms, thereby grounding model outputs in factual, contextually relevant information. Here in this paper, we conduct the first systematic dissection of the multimodal RAG pipeline for LVLMs, explicitly investigating (1) the retrieval phase: on the modality configurations and retrieval strategies, (2) the re-ranking stage: on strategies to mitigate positional biases and improve the relevance of retrieved evidence, and (3) the generation phase: we further investigate how to best integrate retrieved candidates into the final generation process. Finally, we extend to explore a unified agentic framework that integrates re-ranking and generation through self-reflection, enabling LVLMs to select relevant evidence and suppress irrelevant context dynamically. Our full-stack exploration of RAG for LVLMs yields substantial insights, resulting in an average performance boost of 5% without any fine-tuning.