# QuIC: Quantum-Inspired Compound Adapters for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06916/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [DoRA: Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09353/) (2024)
- [A Large-scale Study of Representation Learning with the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04867/) (2019)
- [LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01933/) (2023)
- [VeRA: Vector-based Random Matrix Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11454/) (2023)
- [Tensorizing Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06569/) (2015)
- [Controlling Text-to-Image Diffusion by Orthogonal Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07280/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Orthogonal Finetuning via Butterfly Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06243/) (2023)
- [Navigating Text-To-Image Customization: From LyCORIS Fine-Tuning to Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14859/) (2023)
- [Learning towards Minimum Hyperspherical Energy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09298/) (2018)
- [Quantum Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08167/) (2022)
- [CompactifAI: Extreme Compression of Large Language Models using Quantum-Inspired Tensor Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14109/) (2024)
- [QuanTA: Efficient High-Rank Fine-Tuning of LLMs with Quantum-Informed Tensor Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00132/) (2024)
- [Quantum Deep Hedging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16585/) (2023)
- [Improved Financial Forecasting via Quantum Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12965/) (2023)
- [Quantum machine learning with subspace states](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00054/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Orthogonal Finetuning Made Scalable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19847/) (2025)
- [Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14822/) (2026)
- [Scalable Message-Passing Quantum Graph Neural Networks in the Weisfeiler-Leman Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26873/) (2026)
- [Circuit Hypernetworks for Quantum-Augmented Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24657/) (2026)
- [SQUARE: Structured Quantum Representation Adapters as Compact Quadratic Feature Maps for Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37134/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scaling full finetuning of large foundation models strains GPU memory and training time. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods address this issue via adapter modules which update only a small subset of model parameters. In this work, we introduce Quantum-Inspired Compound Adapters (QuIC Adapters), a PEFT approach inspired from Hamming-weight preserving quantum circuits that can effectively finetune a model using less than 0.02% memory footprint of the base model. QuIC adapters preserve pretrained representations by enforcing orthogonality in weight parameters, and have native deployment mechanisms on quantum computers. We test QuIC adapters by finetuning large language models like LLaMA and vision transformers on language, math, reasoning and vision benchmarks. In its first-order configuration, QuIC recovers the performance of existing orthogonal methods, while higher-order configurations enable substantial parameter compression (over 40x smaller than LoRA) for a modest performance trade-off, unlocking applications in highly resource-constrained environments. Through ablation studies, we determine that combining multiple Hamming-weight orders with orthogonality and matrix compounding are essential for performant finetuning. Our findings suggest that QuIC adapters offers a promising direction for efficient finetuning of foundation models in resource-constrained environments.