# Output Composability of QLoRA PEFT Modules for Plug-and-Play Attribute-Controlled Text Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12345/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01405/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06367/) (2020)
- [LoraHub: Efficient Cross-Task Generalization via Dynamic LoRA Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13269/) (2023)
- [One Billion Word Benchmark for Measuring Progress in Statistical Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.3005/) (2013)
- [SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07904/) (2021)
- [Merging LoRAs like Playing LEGO: Pushing the Modularity of LoRA to Extremes Through Rank-Wise Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16167/) (2024)
- [Adapters: A Unified Library for Parameter-Efficient and Modular Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11077/) (2023)
- [LoRA Land: 310 Fine-tuned LLMs that Rival GPT-4, A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00732/) (2024)
- [Sentence-Level Fluency Evaluation: References Help, But Can Be Spared!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08731/) (2018)
- [Controllable Text Generation via Probability Density Estimation in the Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08307/) (2022)
- [Low-Rank Adaptation for Multilingual Summarization: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08572/) (2023)
- [MacLaSa: Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation via Efficient Sampling from Compact Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12785/) (2023)
- [Assessing the Portability of Parameter Matrices Trained by Parameter-Efficient Finetuning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14228/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques offer task-specific fine-tuning at a fraction of the cost of full fine-tuning, but require separate fine-tuning for every new task (combination). In this paper, we explore three ways of generalising beyond single-task training/inference: (i) training on combinations of multiple, related datasets; (ii) at inference, composing the weight matrices of separately trained PEFT modules; and (iii) at inference, composing the outputs of separately trained PEFT modules. We test these approaches on three different LLMs, QLoRA as the PEFT technique, and three sets of controlled text generation datasets for sentiment control, topic control, and multi-attribute control. We find that summing PEFT module outputs is a particularly strong composition method, which consistently either outperforms or matches the performance of alternative approaches. This is the case even when comparing against single-task specialised modules on the single-task test set, where three-module output composition achieves an average 2% point performance increase across all models for sentiment control.
