# NAS-LoRA: Empowering Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Visual Foundation Models with Searchable Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03499/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [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)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [Kvasir-SEG: A Segmented Polyp Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07069/) (2019)
- [VeRA: Vector-based Random Matrix Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11454/) (2023)
- [PC-DARTS: Partial Channel Connections for Memory-Efficient Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05737/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Neural Architecture Search: Challenges and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02903/) (2020)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [Learning the Best Pooling Strategy for Visual Semantic Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04305/) (2020)
- [Segmenting Transparent Objects in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13948/) (2020)
- [The Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Remote Sensing Applications: From Zero to One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16623/) (2023)
- [β-DARTS: Beta-Decay Regularization for Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01665/) (2022)
- [Residual Prompt Tuning: Improving Prompt Tuning with Residual Reparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03937/) (2023)
- [VMT-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Multi-Task Dense Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08733/) (2023)
- [Visual Query Tuning: Towards Effective Usage of Intermediate Representations for Parameter and Memory Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03220/) (2022)
- [SAM Fails to Segment Anything? -- SAM-Adapter: Adapting SAM in Underperformed Scenes: Camouflage, Shadow, Medical Image Segmentation, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09148/) (2023)
- [5%>100%: Breaking Performance Shackles of Full Fine-Tuning on Visual Recognition Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08345/) (2024)
- [IS-DARTS: Stabilizing DARTS through Precise Measurement on Candidate Importance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12648/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has emerged as a powerful visual foundation model for image segmentation. However, adapting SAM to specific downstream tasks, such as medical and agricultural imaging, remains a significant challenge. To address this, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants have been widely employed to enhancing SAM's adaptation performance on diverse domains. Despite advancements, a critical question arises: can we integrate inductive bias into the model? This is particularly relevant since the Transformer encoder in SAM inherently lacks spatial priors within image patches, potentially hindering the acquisition of high-level semantic information. In this paper, we propose NAS-LoRA, a new Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method designed to bridge the semantic gap between pre-trained SAM and specialized domains. Specifically, NAS-LoRA incorporates a lightweight Neural Architecture Search (NAS) block between the encoder and decoder components of LoRA to dynamically optimize the prior knowledge integrated into weight updates. Furthermore, we propose a stage-wise optimization strategy to help the ViT encoder balance weight updates and architectural adjustments, facilitating the gradual learning of high-level semantic information. Various Experiments demonstrate our NAS-LoRA improves existing PEFT methods, while reducing training cost by 24.14% without increasing inference cost, highlighting the potential of NAS in enhancing PEFT for visual foundation models.