Understanding the Learning Dynamics of LoRA: A Gradient Flow Perspective on Low-Rank Adaptation in Matrix Factorization
Despite the empirical success of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) in fine-tuning pre-trained models, there is little theoretical understanding of how first-order methods with carefully crafted initialization adapt models to new tasks. In this work, we take the first step towards bridging this gap by theoretically analyzing the learning dynamics of LoRA for matrix factorization (MF) under gradient flow (GF), emphasizing the crucial role of initialization. For small initialization, we theoretically show that GF converges to a neighborhood of the optimal solution, with smaller initialization leading to lower final error. Our analysis shows that the final error is affected by the misalignment between the singular spaces of the pre-trained model and the target matrix, and reducing the initialization scale improves alignment. To address this misalignment, we propose a spectral initialization for LoRA in MF and theoretically prove that GF with small spectral initialization converges to the fine-tuning task with arbitrary precision. Numerical experiments from MF and image classification validate our findings.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
image-classificationImage ClassificationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Generalized energy and gradient flow via graph framelets
In this work, we provide a theoretical understanding of the framelet-based graph neural networks through the perspective of energy gradient flow. By viewing the framelet-based models as discretized gradient flows of some…
Graph Neural NetworkWasserstein Evolution : Evolutionary Optimization as Phase Transition
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) serve as powerful black-box optimizers inspired by biological evolution. However, most existing EAs predominantly focus on heuristic operators such as crossover and mutation, while usually o…
Entropy annealing for policy mirror descent in continuous time and space
Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quan…
Policy Gradient MethodsRank-Accuracy Trade-off for LoRA: A Gradient-Flow Analysis
Previous empirical studies have shown that LoRA achieves accuracy comparable to full-parameter methods on downstream fine-tuning tasks, even for rank-1 updates. By contrast, the theoretical underpinnings of the dependenc…
A Call to Lagrangian Action: Learning Population Mechanics from Temporal Snapshots
The population dynamics of molecules, cells, and organisms are governed by a number of unknown forces. In the last decade, population dynamics have predominantly been modeled with Wasserstein gradient flows. However, sin…