# Improving LoRA with Variational Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14280 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14280/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Optimizing Neural Networks with Kronecker-factored Approximate Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.05671/) (2015)
- [CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10297/) (2020)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09673/) (2024)
- [DyLoRA: Parameter Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Models using Dynamic Search-Free Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07558/) (2022)
- [AdapterDrop: On the Efficiency of Adapters in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11918/) (2020)
- [ReLoRA: High-Rank Training Through Low-Rank Updates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05695/) (2023)
- [LoftQ: LoRA-Fine-Tuning-Aware Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08659/) (2023)
- [Learning to Mine Aligned Code and Natural Language Pairs from Stack Overflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08949/) (2018)
- [QA-LoRA: Quantization-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14717/) (2023)
- [LoRA-FA: Efficient and Effective Low Rank Representation Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03303/) (2023)
- [Flipout: Efficient Pseudo-Independent Weight Perturbations on Mini-Batches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04386/) (2018)
- [Bayesian Low-rank Adaptation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13111/) (2023)
- [CodeBERTScore: Evaluating Code Generation with Pretrained Models of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05527/) (2023)
- [Sparse Low-rank Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11696/) (2023)
- [SparseAdapter: An Easy Approach for Improving the Parameter-Efficiency of Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04284/) (2022)

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

- [Variational Low-Rank Adaptation for Personalized Impaired Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20397/) (2025)
- [SOAP-Bubbles: Structured Weight Uncertainty for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23357/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Generation and Decision-Making Under Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30578/) (2026)
- [Parameter Exploration for RLVR via Variational Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09805/) (2026)
- [Certification Frontiers for Gaussian LoRA: Independent Priors, Posterior Risk, and Prediction-Preserving Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bayesian methods have recently been used to improve LoRA finetuning and, although they improve calibration, their effect on other metrics (such as accuracy) is marginal and can sometimes even be detrimental. Moreover, Bayesian methods also increase computational overheads and require additional tricks for them to work well. Here, we fix these issues by using a recently proposed variational algorithm called IVON. We show that IVON is easy to implement and has similar costs to AdamW, and yet it can also drastically improve many metrics by using a simple posterior pruning technique. We present extensive results on billion-scale LLMs (Llama and Qwen series) going way beyond the scale of existing applications of IVON. For example, we finetune a Llama-3.2-3B model on a set of commonsense reasoning tasks and improve accuracy over AdamW by 1.3% and reduce ECE by 5.4%, outperforming AdamW and other recent Bayesian methods like Laplace-LoRA and BLoB. Overall, our results show that variational learning with IVON can effectively improve LoRA finetuning.