English

Fine Tuning without Catastrophic Forgetting via Selective Low Rank Adaptation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-01-28 v1

Abstract

Adapting deep learning models to new domains often requires computationally intensive retraining and risks catastrophic forgetting. While fine-tuning enables domain-specific adaptation, it can reduce robustness to distribution shifts, impacting out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. Pre-trained zero-shot models like CLIP offer strong generalization but may suffer degraded robustness after fine-tuning. Building on Task Adaptive Parameter Sharing (TAPS), we propose a simple yet effective extension as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method, using an indicator function to selectively activate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) blocks. Our approach minimizes knowledge loss, retains its generalization strengths under domain shifts, and significantly reduces computational costs compared to traditional fine-tuning. We demonstrate that effective fine-tuning can be achieved with as few as 5\% of active blocks, substantially improving efficiency. Evaluations on pre-trained models such as CLIP and DINO-ViT demonstrate our method's broad applicability and effectiveness in maintaining performance and knowledge retention.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.15377,
  title  = {Fine Tuning without Catastrophic Forgetting via Selective Low Rank Adaptation},
  author = {Reza Akbarian Bafghi and Carden Bagwell and Avinash Ravichandran and Ashish Shrivastava and Maziar Raissi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.15377},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:17:54.911Z