EWoRA: Expert Weighted Low-Rank Adaptation for Heterogeneous Data

Harsh Kohli, Helian Feng, Lenon Minorics, Bhoomit Vasani, Xin He, Ali Kebarighotbi


Abstract
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach for language models. By restricting weight updates to a low-rank subspace, LoRA achieves cost-effective finetuning of large, generalist models to more specialized target domains. While LoRA achieves impressive results for a variety of individual downstream tasks, it struggles to capture the diverse expertise needed when presented with a more heterogeneous finetuning corpus. To address this, we propose Expert Weighted Low-Rank Adaptation (EWoRA), a novel LoRA variant that partitions a rank-(r) adapter into (n) independent adapters of rank (r/n). A lightweight “routing” matrix (W_r R^r n) aggregates the outputs of these adapters by learning specialized weights for each context. Experiments show EWoRA improves performance over LoRA when finetuning on heterogeneous data while generally matching or exceeding LoRA performance on individual finetuning tasks under the same low-rank parameter budget.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1729–1737
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.108/
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Cite (ACL):
Harsh Kohli, Helian Feng, Lenon Minorics, Bhoomit Vasani, Xin He, and Ali Kebarighotbi. 2025. EWoRA: Expert Weighted Low-Rank Adaptation for Heterogeneous Data. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1729–1737, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EWoRA: Expert Weighted Low-Rank Adaptation for Heterogeneous Data (Kohli et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.108.pdf