Matched-Learning-Rate Analysis of Attention Drift and Transfer Retention in Fine-Tuned CLIP

CLIP adaptation can improve in-domain accuracy while degrading out-of-domain transfer, but comparisons between Full Fine-Tuning (Full FT) and LoRA are often confounded by different learning-rate conventions. We study how adaptation method and optimization scale jointly shape attention drift and transfer retention in CLIP using a controlled matched-learning-rate comparison of Full FT and LoRA. The completed matrix contains 80 runs on CLIP ViT-B/32 across EuroSAT and Oxford-IIIT Pets, spanning four shared learning rates (10-6, 5×10-6, 10-5, 5×10-5) and five seeds, and evaluates attention-drift metrics, best validation accuracy, and adapter-aware CIFAR-100 zero-shot accuracy. Learning rate strongly modulates structural change: on EuroSAT, Full FT moves from mild entropy broadening at 10-6 to marked contraction at 5×10-5, whereas LoRA remains entropy-positive across the full matched grid. At matched learning rates, LoRA preserves substantially more zero-shot transfer than Full FT, averaging 45.13% versus 11.28% CIFAR-100 accuracy on EuroSAT and 58.01% versus 8.54% on Pets. Oxford-IIIT Pets also reveals a regime effect: low-learning-rate LoRA underfits in-domain, so method-only averages can obscure when LoRA becomes competitive. Supporting rollout, patch-to-patch, and CKA analyses are directionally consistent with the controlled matrix. Overall, matched-learning-rate evaluation materially changes the interpretation of Full FT versus LoRA, and attention drift is most useful as a descriptive diagnostic of representation preservation rather than a causal explanation of transfer behavior.