# COLORA: Efficient Fine-Tuning for Convolutional Models with a Study Case on Optical Coherence Tomography Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18315 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18315/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Pretrained Foundation Models: A History from BERT to ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09419/) (2023)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis: Full Training or Fine Tuning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00712/) (2017)
- [MedMNIST Classification Decathlon: A Lightweight AutoML Benchmark for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14925/) (2020)
- [InfLoRA: Interference-Free Low-Rank Adaptation for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00228/) (2024)
- [Efficient parametrization of multi-domain deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10082/) (2018)
- [MedViT: A Robust Vision Transformer for Generalized Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09462/) (2023)
- [MedMamba: Vision Mamba for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03849/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning for Domain-specific Gastrointestinal Disease Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10451/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce CoLoRA (Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CoLoRA extends LoRA to convolutional layers by decomposing kernel updates into lightweight depthwise and pointwise components. This design reduces the number of trainable convolutional-update parameters by over 80% compared with full convolutional fine-tuning, while allowing the learned updates to be merged into the pretrained convolutional kernels, thereby preserving the original model size and inference complexity. Experiments on MedMNIST datasets, particularly OCTMNISTv2, demonstrate that CoLoRA applied to VGG16 and ResNet50 achieves competitive classification performance while substantially reducing the number of trainable parameters. Comparisons with transfer learning, adapters, BitFit, and convolutional LoRA variants further characterize the trade-offs among predictive performance, trainable parameters, and training cost. Additional experiments on CIFAR-100 and Cats vs. Dogs provide preliminary evidence that the proposed adaptation strategy also transfers to non-medical image-classification tasks. Peak GPU-memory measurements further show that parameter efficiency does not translate directly into proportional training-memory savings, with memory consumption depending strongly on the placement of the adapted convolutional layers. Overall, CoLoRA provides a parameter-efficient and deployment-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning for convolutional models.