BiDoRA: Bi-level Optimization-Based Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of LLMs has gained considerable attention as a flexible and efficient way of adapting LLMs to downstream tasks. Among these methods, weighted decomposed low-rank adaptation (DoRA) has emerged as a promising approach. DoRA bridges the gap between low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and full fine-tuning (FT) by decomposing the weight matrices into magnitude and direction components, thereby maintaining learning behavior similar to FT. Although DoRA shows encouraging performance, it introduces additional parameters compared to LoRA, which potentially increases the risk of overfitting. Moreover, optimizing magnitude and direction simultaneously leads to a coupled gradient updating pattern for both components, limiting its learning capacity. To overcome these limitations, we propose BiDoRA, a bi-level optimization-based PEFT method. In BiDoRA, the direction and magnitude components are optimized on two distinct datasets at different optimization levels, mitigating the risk of overfitting. Additionally, the asynchronous optimization of the two components promotes their decoupling, allowing for more flexible gradient updates suitable for various downstream tasks. Evaluation of BiDoRA on fourteen datasets spanning natural language understanding, natural language generation, and token classification reveals that it significantly outperforms DoRA and other PEFT methods. The superior performance of BiDoRA underscores its effectiveness. The code for BiDoRA is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BiDoRA-5D31.