Not How Many, But Which: Parameter Placement in Low-Rank Adaptation

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that places trainable low-rank adapters into frozen pre-trained models. Recent studies show that using fewer LoRA adapters may still maintain or even improve performance, but existing methods still distribute adapters broadly, leaving where to place a limited number of adapters to maximize performance largely open. To investigate this, we introduce PAGE (Projected Adapter Gradient Energy), a gradient-based sensitivity probe that estimates the initial trainable gradient energy available to each candidate LoRA adapter. Surprisingly, we find that PAGE is highly concentrated on a single shallow FFN down-projection across two model families and four downstream tasks. We term this module the dominant adaptation module and show that its layer index is architecture-dependent but task-stable. Motivated by this finding, we propose DomLoRA, a placement method that places a single adapter at the dominant adaptation module. With only ~0.7% of vanilla LoRA's trainable parameters, DomLoRA outperforms it on average across various downstream tasks, including instruction following, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and multi-turn conversation. This method also improves other LoRA variants, supporting the dominant adaptation module perspective as a practical placement guideline.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tunes large pretrained models at a fraction of the cost of full fine-tuning, but its performance depends strongly on how the adapters are initialized. Recent schemes initialize the adapters from the downstream loss gradient: some project the raw gradient onto its top directions, while others first whiten it with an estimate of the loss curvature. We show that these seemingly distinct methods are points on a single continuum: a two-parameter family of preconditioned gradient initializations, which we call Unified LoRA (ULoRA), governed by a spectral whitening exponent and an Adam-like diagonal exponent. Sweeping this family under a full learning-rate search, we find that no single fixed preconditioning strength dominates: the best operating point is task-dependent and frequently lies strictly inside the family, away from the published endpoints. Treated as an upper bound of this family, a tuned ULoRA configuration matches or exceeds full fine-tuning on all five GLUE tasks with RoBERTa-base and is competitive with the strongest baselines on GSM8K with LLaMA-2-7B. Our deployable, search-free variant, ULoRA-Auto, selects per-layer exponents from measured spectral statistics, approaches this upper bound at no additional search cost, and ranks at or near the top among deployable LoRA methods. Our results show that a principled design space for LoRA initialization and curvature preconditioning should be treated as a tunable dimension rather than a fixed design decision.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) assigns a uniform rank to every adapted weight matrix - a practical convenience that ignores a fundamental reality: different layers contribute unequally to task adaptation. We address this with a lightweight engineering solution: before fine-tuning begins, run eight calibration backward passes, compute the gradient variance of each LoRA-B matrix as a proxy for layer informativeness, and redistribute the rank budget proportionally. The resulting adapter is a standard LoRA with a per-layer rank pattern - no new parameters, no training overhead, no changes to serving infrastructure. We implement this via an efficient approximation of the empirical Fisher Information Matrix (eFIM) diagonal, restricted to LoRA adapter matrices only, which reduces memory cost by approximately 256x compared to full-model Fisher estimation. On GLUE with DeBERTa-v3-base, FIM-LoRA matches LoRA (88.6 vs. 88.7) at the same parameter budget, and on commonsense reasoning with LLaMA-3-8B reaches 68.5 vs. 68.7 for LoRA. The per-layer rank maps are interpretable: value projections and early-to-middle layers consistently receive higher rank, consistent with established findings on transformer layer roles.