SVFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Singular Vectors

Popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA and its variants, freeze pre-trained model weights \ (W\) and inject learnable matrices \ (W\). These \ (W\) matrices are structured for efficient parameterization, often using techniques like low-rank approximations or scaling vectors. However, these methods typically show a performance gap compared to full fine-tuning. Although recent PEFT methods have narrowed this gap, they do so at the cost of additional learnable parameters. We propose SVFT, a simple approach that fundamentally differs from existing methods: the structure imposed on \ (W\) depends on the specific weight matrix \ (W\). Specifically, SVFT updates \ (W\) as a sparse combination of outer products of its singular vectors, training only the coefficients (scales) of these sparse combinations. This approach allows fine-grained control over expressivity through the number of coefficients. Extensive experiments on language and vision benchmarks show that SVFT recovers up to 96% of full fine-tuning performance while training only 0. 006 to 0. 25% of parameters, outperforming existing methods that only recover up to 85% performance using 0. 03 to 0. 8% of the trainable parameter budget.