GeLoRA: Geometric Adaptive Ranks For Efficient LoRA Fine-tuning

Abstract

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is computationally intensive because it requires updating all parameters. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) improves efficiency by modifying only a subset of weights but introduces a trade-off between expressivity and computational cost: lower ranks reduce resources but limit expressiveness, while higher ranks enhance expressivity at increased cost. Despite recent advances in adaptive LoRA techniques, existing methods fail to provide a theoretical basis for optimizing the trade-off between model performance and efficiency. We propose Geometric Low-Rank Adaptation (GeLoRA), a novel framework that computes the intrinsic dimensionality of hidden state representations to adaptively select LoRA ranks. We demonstrate that the intrinsic dimension provides a lower bound for the optimal rank of LoRA matrices, allowing for a principled selection that balances efficiency and expressivity. GeLoRA dynamically adjusts the rank for each layer based on the intrinsic dimensionality of its input and output representations, recognizing that not all model parameters equally impact fine-tuning. Empirical validation on multiple tasks shows that GeLoRA consistently outperforms recent baselines within the same parameter budget.