English

LoCO: Low-rank Compositional Rotation Fine-tuning

Machine Learning 2026-05-18 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as an critical technique for adapting large-scale foundation models across natural language processing and computer vision. While existing methods such as low-rank adaptations achieve parameter efficiency via low-rank weight updates, they are limited in their ability to preserve the geometric structure of pretrained representations. We introduce Low-rank Compositional Orthogonal fine-tuning (LoCO), a novel PEFT method that constructs orthogonal transformations through low-rank skew-symmetric matrices and compositional rotation chains. We propose an approximation scheme that enables fully parallel computation of compositional rotations, making the approach practical for high-dimensional feature spaces. Our method maintains low computational complexity while maintaining orthogonality with controlled approximation error. We validate LoCO across diverse domains, including diffusion transformer fine-tuning, vision transformer adaptation, and language model adaptation. Our method demonstrates superior or competitive performance compared to both existing orthogonal and non-orthogonal methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.15916,
  title  = {LoCO: Low-rank Compositional Rotation Fine-tuning},
  author = {An Nguyen and Jaesik Choi and Anh Tong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.15916},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

IJCAI 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:14:24.346Z