# Frequency Switching Mechanism for Parameter-E!cient Multi-Task Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21111 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21111/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [DoRA: Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09353/) (2024)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04647/) (2021)
- [VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06825/) (2021)
- [Parameter-efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning for Transformers via Shared Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04489/) (2021)
- [Multi-Task Learning as a Bargaining Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01017/) (2022)
- [MTI-Net: Multi-Scale Task Interaction Networks for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06902/) (2020)
- [Convolution Meets LoRA: Parameter Efficient Finetuning for Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17868/) (2024)
- [Polyhistor: Parameter-Efficient Multi-Task Adaptation for Dense Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03265/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Large Models: A Survey of Methodologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19878/) (2024)
- [MTLoRA: A Low-Rank Adaptation Approach for Efficient Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20320/) (2024)
- [A survey of the Vision Transformers and their CNN-Transformer based Variants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09880/) (2023)
- [Efficient Learning With Sine-Activated Low-rank Matrices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19243/) (2024)
- [DiffusionMTL: Learning Multi-Task Denoising Diffusion Model from Partially Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15389/) (2024)
- [PEFT A2Z: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Survey for Large Language and Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14117/) (2025)
- [DiTASK: Multi-Task Fine-Tuning with Diffeomorphic Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06029/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DeCo: Efficient Decouple-to-Couple Learning for Multi-Task Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24409/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to enable a single model to solve multiple tasks efficiently; however, current parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods remain largely limited to single-task adaptation. We introduce Free Sinewich, a parameter-efficient multi-task learning framework that enables near-zero-cost weight modulation via frequency switching (Free). Specifically, a Sine-AWB (Sinewich) layer combines low-rank factors and convolutional priors into a single kernel, which is then modulated elementwise by a sinusoidal transformation to produce task-specialized weights. A lightweight Clock Net is introduced to produce bounded frequencies that stabilize this modulation during training. Theoretically, sine modulation enhances the rank of low-rank adapters, while frequency separation decorrelates the weights of different tasks. On dense prediction benchmarks, Free Sinewich achieves state-of-the-art performance-efficiency trade-offs (e.g., up to +5.39% improvement over single-task fine-tuning with only 6.53M trainable parameters), offering a compact and scalable paradigm based on frequency-based parameter sharing. Project page: hrefhttps://casperliuliuliu.github.io/projects/Free-Sinewich/https://casperliuliuliu.github.io/projects/Free-Sinewich.