EigenLoRAx: Recycling Adapters to Find Principal Subspaces for Resource-Efficient Adaptation and Inference

The rapid growth of large models has raised concerns about their environmental impact and equity in accessibility due to significant computational costs. Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) offer a lightweight solution for finetuning large models, resulting in an abundance of publicly available adapters tailored to diverse domains. We ask: Can these pretrained adapters be leveraged to further streamline adaptation to new tasks while addressing these challenges? We introduce EigenLoRAx, a parameter-efficient finetuning method that recycles existing adapters to create a principal subspace aligned with their shared domain knowledge which can be further augmented with orthogonal basis vectors in low-resource scenarios. This enables rapid adaptation to new tasks by learning only lightweight coefficients on the principal components of the subspace - eliminating the need to finetune entire adapters. EigenLoRAx requires significantly fewer parameters and memory, improving efficiency for both training and inference. Our method demonstrates strong performance across diverse domains and tasks, offering a scalable for edge-based applications, personalization, and equitable deployment of large models in resource-constrained environments.

Task Arithmetic with LoRA for Continual Learning

Continual learning refers to the problem where the training data is available in sequential chunks, termed "tasks". The majority of progress in continual learning has been stunted by the problem of catastrophic forgetting, which is caused by sequential training of the model on streams of data. Moreover, it becomes computationally expensive to sequentially train large models multiple times. To mitigate both of these problems at once, we propose a novel method to continually train transformer-based vision models using low-rank adaptation and task arithmetic. Our method completely bypasses the problem of catastrophic forgetting, as well as reducing the computational requirement for training models on each task. When aided with a small memory of 10 samples per class, our method achieves performance close to full-set finetuning. We present rigorous ablations to support the prowess of our method.

Two-stage Pipeline for Multilingual Dialect Detection

Dialect Identification is a crucial task for localizing various Large Language Models. This paper outlines our approach to the VarDial 2023 shared task. Here we have to identify three or two dialects from three languages each which results in a 9-way classification for Track-1 and 6-way classification for Track-2 respectively. Our proposed approach consists of a two-stage system and outperforms other participants' systems and previous works in this domain. We achieve a score of 58.54% for Track-1 and 85.61% for Track-2. Our codebase is available publicly (https://github.com/ankit-vaidya19/EACL_VarDial2023).