PHLoRA: data-free Post-hoc Low-Rank Adapter extraction from full-rank checkpoint

Bhoomit Vasani, Jack FitzGerald, Anjie Fang, Sushmit Vaish


Abstract
We introduce PHLoRA (Pronounced “flora”) (Post-hoc LoRA), a simple yet powerful method to extract low-rank adaptation adapters from full-rank fine-tuned models without requiring access to training data or gradients. By computing the low-rank decomposition of weight differences between a base model and its fine-tuned counterpart, our method reconstructs adapter modules that can be merged or dynamically routed at inference time via S-LoRA, AdapterFusion, or served in scalable, industry settings using platforms like NVIDIA NIM.This approach amortizes latency overhead across requests and yields substantial cost savings. Unlike prior work that trains each adapter explicitly, our approach decouples fine-tuning from adapter generation, allowing adapter extraction from existing full-rank models or third-party checkpoints. Experiments on text, image, and video benchmarks using the Amazon Nova model family demonstrate that extracted adapters preserve high energy from the full weight delta, can be pruned safely, and yield negligible degradation in downstream task performance when re-merged. Overall, PHLoRA provides a practical path for making all existing full-rank checkpoints adapter-ready, democratizing scalable inference for all models.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.125
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
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Findings
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Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
1992–1999
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.125/
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Cite (ACL):
Bhoomit Vasani, Jack FitzGerald, Anjie Fang, and Sushmit Vaish. 2025. PHLoRA: data-free Post-hoc Low-Rank Adapter extraction from full-rank checkpoint. 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 1992–1999, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PHLoRA: data-free Post-hoc Low-Rank Adapter extraction from full-rank checkpoint (Vasani et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.125.pdf