# PVeRA: Probabilistic Vector-Based Random Matrix Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07703 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07703/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [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)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04647/) (2021)
- [Rotation Equivariant CNNs for Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03962/) (2018)
- [Calibrating Deep Neural Networks using Focal Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09437/) (2020)
- [Visual-Language Prompt Tuning with Knowledge-guided Context Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13283/) (2023)
- [VeRA: Vector-based Random Matrix Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11454/) (2023)
- [Probabilistic Face Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09658/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Embeddings for Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05068/) (2021)
- [DeepMind Lab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03801/) (2016)
- [Modeling Uncertainty with Hedged Instance Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00319/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large foundation models have emerged in the last years and are pushing performance boundaries for a variety of tasks. Training or even finetuning such models demands vast datasets and computational resources, which are often scarce and costly. Adaptation methods provide a computationally efficient solution to address these limitations by allowing such models to be finetuned on small amounts of data and computing power. This is achieved by appending new trainable modules to frozen backbones with only a fraction of the trainable parameters and fitting only these modules on novel tasks. Recently, the VeRA adapter was shown to excel in parameter-efficient adaptations by utilizing a pair of frozen random low-rank matrices shared across all layers. In this paper, we propose PVeRA, a probabilistic version of the VeRA adapter, which modifies the low-rank matrices of VeRA in a probabilistic manner. This modification naturally allows handling inherent ambiguities in the input and allows for different sampling configurations during training and testing. A comprehensive evaluation was performed on the VTAB-1k benchmark and seven adapters, with PVeRA outperforming VeRA and other adapters. Our code for training models with PVeRA and benchmarking all adapters is available https://github.com/leofillioux/pvera.