CeRA: Breaking the Linear Ceiling of Low-Rank Adaptation with Non-linearity Retained at Inference

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) dominates parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). However, it faces a ``linear ceiling'': increasing the rank yields diminishing returns in expressive capacity due to linear constraints. We introduce CeRA (Capacity-enhanced Rank Adaptation), a weight-level parallel adapter that injects SiLU gating and dropout to induce non-linearity during inference, thereby placing it in a different function class from adapters whose non-linearity exists during training and collapses to an affine map at inference time. On both the basic arithmetic (GSM8K) and the complex MATH benchmark, CeRA is markedly more parameter-efficient. Across a full rank × learning rate sweep, CeRA at rank 64 achieves the highest MATH pass@1 of any configuration in the grid (23.6%), matching or exceeding both a rank-512 LoRA (22.4%) and DoRA (19.8%) while using only 1/8 of the parameter budget. With the rank and learning rate fixed, CeRA equals or outperforms LoRA in 10 of 12 matched settings. Spectrally, CeRA's learned updates utilize the singular-value spectrum more broadly than linear adapters, which exhibit rank collapse at high rank, although a scale-matched control shows that this difference stems mostly from output scale and partially from non-linearity. Additionally, dropout appears to contribute to regularization rather than rank expansion. We release the code for reproducibility: https://github.com/hhchen1105/cera.