BoRA: Towards More Expressive Low-Rank Adaptation with Block Diversity

Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method widely used in LLMs. It approximates the update of a pretrained weight matrix $W\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ by the product of two low-rank matrices, $BA$, where $A \in\mathbb{R}^{r\times n}$ and $B\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times r} (r\ll\min{m,n})$. Increasing the dimension $r$ can raise the rank of LoRA weights (i.e., $BA$), which typically improves fine-tuning performance but also significantly increases the number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we propose Block Diversified Low-Rank Adaptation (BoRA), which improves the rank of LoRA weights with a small number of additional parameters. Specifically, BoRA treats the product $BA$ as a block matrix multiplication, where $A$ and $B$ are partitioned into $b$ blocks along the columns and rows, respectively (i.e., $A=[A_1,\dots,A_b]$ and $B=[B_1,\dots,B_b]^\top$). Consequently, the product $BA$ becomes the concatenation of the block products $B_iA_j$ for $i,j\in[b]$. To enhance the diversity of different block products, BoRA introduces a unique diagonal matrix $\Sigma_{i,j} \in \mathbb{R}^{r\times r}$ for each block multiplication, resulting in $B_i \Sigma_{i,j} A_j$. By leveraging these block-wise diagonal matrices, BoRA increases the rank of LoRA weights by a factor of $b$ while only requiring $b^2r$ additional parameters. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and models demonstrate the superiority of BoRA, and ablation studies further validate its scalability.