Confine to the Task, Anchor the Rest: Concept-Guided Retention Regularizer for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis · University of Virginia
Abstract
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has been widely used, yet the adapted model suffers catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. While most existing work hardens the adapter by constraining where the weight update may lie, we note that constraining this weight channel does not constrain the activation channel. In this paper, we propose Concept-Guided Retention (CGR), a plug-and-play regularizer that constrains both for any PEFT base. CGR reads a frozen sparse autoencoder (SAE) and treats two disjoint concept sets differently. It softly confines the update to the task-concept subspace (via weight channel), and anchors a selected set of general-purpose concepts to the frozen model (via activation channel). We also provide anchor value bounds based on weight updates to understand how they interact, and show that both terms are necessary. On a CLIP vision panel, CGR significantly improves retention at comparable accuracy for every base, and the same pattern holds for world-knowledge retention under Llama-3.1-8B instruction tuning. Because the protected directions are named SAE concepts, CGR remains inspectable and controllable.
Figures & tables
| Method | PEFT | Weight | Activ. | Pers. | Split | Bound | V+L |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OPLoRA | ✓ | hard | ✓ | ||||
| LoRA-Null | ✓ | hard | |||||
| CorDA | ✓ | hard | |||||
| SC-LoRA | ✓ | hard | |||||
| SAILS | ✓ | hard | |||||
| CWAC | hard | soft | ✓ |
| FGVC | CUB | DTD | Flow | Pets | EuroS | RESISC | DiabR | dSpr-O | SVHN | Avg | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Ret |
| Zero-shot | 19.3 | 82.6 | 70.9 | 82.6 | 54.6 | 82.6 | 73.0 | 82.6 | 89.8 | 82.6 | 40.5 | 82.6 | 61.9 | 82.6 | 35.4 | 82.6 | 9.3 | 82.6 | 60.4 | 82.6 | 82.6 |
| LoRA | 59.3 | 67.9 | 74.6 | 70.1 | 71.5 | 74.1 | 93.2 | 76.3 | 82.6 | 73.8 | 93.6 | 78.3 | 83.0 | 76.7 | 72.3 | 78.6 | 43.6 | 70.9 | 89.4 | 73.8 | |
| CGR | 60.1 | 78.0 | 76.4 | 78.7 | 74.3 | 80.5 | 95.0 | 81.6 | 86.1 | 80.8 | 93.4 | 81.2 | 84.0 | 81.8 | 72.9 | 81.2 | 42.9 | 77.9 | 85.8 | 80.6 | ⋆ |
| OPLoRA | 58.9 | 69.9 | 75.1 | 69.3 | 72.1 | 72.1 | 93.4 | 76.9 | 81.5 | 75.9 | 95.1 | 78.9 | 82.7 | 77.3 | 72.6 | 76.4 | 44.2 | 72.2 | 89.8 | 74.6 | |
| CGR | 59.5 | 79.2 | 76.6 | 79.2 | 74.6 | 80.5 | 95.4 | 81.6 | 85.7 | 81.1 | 93.4 | 81.4 | 84.3 | 82.1 | 73.3 | 81.7 | 43.4 | 80.0 | 86.3 | 81.5 | ⋆ |
| World-knowledge retention (%) | Target | |||||
| Method | Trivia | NQ-O | WebQS | Avg1 | Per | MTB |
| Zero-shot | 61.5 | 7.9 | 11.6 | 27.0 | 100.0 | – |
| LoRA | 27.6 | 11.1 | 12.4 | 17.1 | 81.6 | 5.8 |
| + CGR | 43.5 | 12.0 | 12.4 | 22.6 | 90.2 | 6.2 |
| LoRA-Null | 47.0 | 9.5 | 9.8 | 22.1 | 87.1 | 3.5 |
| + CGR | 55.9 | 9.1 | 9.7 | 24.9 | 91.5 | 3.3 |
| FGVC | CUB | |||
| Configuration | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret |
| LoRA (no CGR ) | ||||
| Full CGR ∗ | ||||
| Confine only | ||||
| Anchor only | ||||
| SAE-subspace init only | ||||
| FGVC | CUB | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anchor set | Acc | Ret | Acc | Ret | Anch. act. |
| Top- firing (ours) | |||||
| Random selection | |||||
| Last- (least firing) | |||||
| SAE-FD ( Zhang et al. 2026 ) | |||||
| All off-task concepts | |||||
| Anchor set | Trivia | NQ-O | WebQS | Avg1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top- firing (ours) | 43.5 | 12.0 | 12.4 | 22.6 |
| Random selection | 43.4 | 10.7 | 12.1 | 22.1 |
| SAE-FD ( Zhang et al. 2026 ) | 42.1 | 11.1 | 12.1 | 21.7 |
Appendix figures & tables17 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Fine-tuning tasks | Retention probes | |||||||||||||
| FGVC | CUB | DTD | Flow | Pets | EuroS | RESISC | DiabR | dSpr-O | SVHN | C-10 | C-100 | Calt-101 | SUN397 | |
| Classes | ||||||||||||||
| Vision (CLIP) | Language (Llama) | |
| Backbone & frozen SAE | ||
| Backbone | CLIP ViT-B/32 | Llama-3.1-8B (bf16) |
| SAE site | resid., block | resid., layer |
| SAE | Prisma ( , ReLU L1) | Llama-Scope ( , top- ) |
| Optimization | ||
| Method | CIFAR-10 | CIFAR-100 | Caltech-101 | SUN397 | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero-shot (no FT) | 93.8 | 78.2 | 90.9 | 67.6 | 82.6 |
| LoRA | |||||
| CGR ∗ | |||||
| OPLoRA | |||||
| CGR ∗ | |||||
| LoRA-Null |
| World-knowledge retention (%) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | Trivia | NQ-O | WebQS | Avg1 | Per |
| Zero-shot | |||||
| LoRA | |||||
| + CGR | |||||
| LoRA-Null | |||||
| + CGR | |||||
| Natural | Specialized / Structured | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Task | EV | Task | EV |
| Caltech-101 | 0.87 | RESISC-45 | 0.74 |
| SUN397 | 0.86 | EuroSAT | 0.69 |
| DTD | 0.85 | Diabetic-Retino | 0.49 |
| CUB-200 | 0.82 | dSprites-loc/ori | 0.23 |
| Oxford-Pets | 0.81 | ||
| 10 | 30 | 60 | 100 | 150 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FGVC | Acc | |||||
| C-100 ret. | ||||||
| CUB-200 | Acc | |||||
| C-100 ret. |
| Anchor only | Hard proj. anchor | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FGVC | Acc | ||||||
| C-100 ret. | |||||||
| CUB-200 | Acc | ||||||
| C-100 ret. | |||||||
| 32 | 64 | 128 | 256 | 512 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FGVC | Acc | |||||
| C-100 ret. | ||||||
| CUB-200 | Acc | |||||
| C-100 ret. |
| 32 | 64 | 128 | 256 | 512 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FGVC | Acc | |||||
| C-100 ret. | ||||||
| CUB-200 | Acc | |||||
| C-100 ret. |
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Model and adaptation | |
| Frozen pretrained weight at the adapted site, | |
| Additive weight update; for LoRA | |
| LoRA factors, , | |
| LoRA rank | |
| Fixed read-out layer, never tuned | |
Fine-Tuning
Fine-tuning adapts pretrained models to new tasks, domains, and behaviors by updating some or all of their parameters.
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