# FLoRA: Fused forward-backward adapters for parameter efficient fine-tuning and reducing inference-time latencies of LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00050 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00050/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [LoRA+: Efficient Low Rank Adaptation of Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12354/) (2024)
- [LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01933/) (2023)
- [LoRA-FA: Efficient and Effective Low Rank Representation Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03303/) (2023)
- [Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning: A Comprehensive Analysis Across Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13506/) (2024)
- [ResLoRA: Identity Residual Mapping in Low-Rank Adaption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18039/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As the large language models (LLMs) grow in size each day, efficient training and fine-tuning has never been as important as nowadays. This resulted in the great interest in parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), and effective methods including low-rank adapters (LoRA) has emerged. Although the various PEFT methods have been studied extensively in the recent years, the greater part of the subject remains unexplored with the huge degree of freedom. In this paper, we propose FLoRA, a family of fused forward-backward adapters (FFBA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of LLMs on downstream tasks. The FFBA combine ideas from the popular LoRA and parallel adapters to improve the overall fine-tuning accuracies. At the same time, latencies are minimized by fusing the forward and backward adapters into existing projection layers of the base model. Experimental results show that the proposed FFB adapters perform significantly better than the popularly used LoRA in both accuracy and latency for a similar parameter budget.
