Guang-Ze Chen


2025

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An Orthogonal High-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models
Xin Zhang | Guang-Ze Chen | Shuzhen Li | Zhulin Liu | C.L.Philip Chen | Tong Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) efficiently adapts LLMs to downstream tasks by decomposing LLMs’ weight update into trainable low-rank matrices for fine-tuning. However, the random low-rank matrices may introduce massive task-irrelevant information, while their recomposed form suffer from limited representation spaces under low-rank operations. Such dense and choked adaptation in LoRA impairs the adaptation performance of LLMs on downstream tasks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes OHoRA, an orthogonal high-rank adaptation for parameter-efficient fine-tuning on LLMs. According to the information bottleneck theory, OHoRA decomposes LLMs’ pre-trained weight matrices into orthogonal basis vectors via QR decomposition and splits them into two low-redundancy high-rank components to suppress task-irrelevant information. It then performs dynamic rank-elevated recomposition through Kronecker product to generate expansive task-tailored representation spaces, enabling precise LLM adaptation and enhanced generalization. OHoRA effectively operationalizes the information bottleneck theory to decompose LLMs’ weight matrices into low-redundancy high-rank components and recompose them in rank-elevated manner for more task-tailored representation spaces and precise LLM adaptation. Empirical evaluation shows OHoRA’s effectiveness by outperforming LoRA and its variants and achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning with only 0.0371% trainable parameters.