Low-Rank Adaptation of Neural Fields

Abstract: Processing visual data often involves small adjustments or sequences of changes, such as in image filtering, surface smoothing, and video storage. While established graphics techniques like normal mapping and video compression exploit redundancy to encode such small changes efficiently, the problem of encoding small changes to neural fields (NF) -- neural network parameterizations of visual or physical functions -- has received less attention. We propose a parameter-efficient strategy for updating neural fields using low-rank adaptations (LoRA). LoRA, a method from the parameter-efficient fine-tuning LLM community, encodes small updates to pre-trained models with minimal computational overhead. We adapt LoRA to instance-specific neural fields, avoiding the need for large pre-trained models yielding a pipeline suitable for low-compute hardware. We validate our approach with experiments in image filtering, video compression, and geometry editing, demonstrating its effectiveness and versatility for representing neural field updates.