UORA: Uniform Orthogonal Reinitialization Adaptation in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Models

Abstract: This paper introduces Uniform Orthogonal Reinitialization Adaptation (UORA), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach for LLMs. UORA achieves state-of-the-art performance and parameter efficiency by leveraging a low-rank approximation method to reduce the number of trainable parameters. Unlike existing methods such as LoRA and VeRA, UORA employs an interpolation-based reparametrization mechanism that selectively reinitializes rows and columns in frozen projection matrices, guided by the vector magnitude heuristic. This results in substantially fewer trainable parameters compared to LoRA and outperforms VeRA in computation and storage efficiency. Comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate UORA's superiority in achieving competitive fine-tuning performance with negligible computational overhead. We demonstrate its performance on GLUE and E2E benchmarks and its effectiveness in instruction-tuning LLMs and image classification models. Our contributions establish a new paradigm for scalable and resource-efficient fine-tuning of LLMs.