mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Certification Frontiers for Gaussian LoRA: Independent Priors, Posterior Risk, and Prediction-Preserving Balancing

arXiv 2609.32271 ↗First posted 26 Sep 2026cs.LGcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Post-hoc Bayesian fine-tuning places Gaussians around trained low-rank adapters, yet a calibrated posterior does not by itself yield a useful generalization certificate. Such a posterior admits an informative PAC-Bayes certificate only when both the loss of its sampled predictors and its KL divergence from an admissible prior are small. In this research, we characterize this certification frontier for Gaussian LoRA posteriors and separate three interventions: changing the prior, changing the stochastic predictor, and changing only how its complexity is counted. First, an exact isotropic KL envelope eliminates the prior scale and yields a width threshold that excludes posterior widths before sampling, while a zero-KL floor identifies targets that no complexity reduction can reach at a measured risk bound. Second, we minimize KL in closed form over the full GL(r) symmetry of the low-rank factors, leaving every sampled adapter product unchanged, and derive the noncentral objective required when the prior center is trained on an independent split. On a small-pool RoBERTa audit of 567 configurations, the recorded 64-draw summaries imply a certificate floor of 0.7298 even with zero KL and Chernoff accounting, so reducing complexity alone cannot certify these posteriors at the recorded budgets. For a stable posterior in a controlled Gaussian-factor task, Chernoff accounting certifies risk below 0.1 on 20 of 20 datasets with 1024 draws, whereas Hoeffding certifies none. On deliberately deformed synthetic rank-four factors, matrix balancing reduces KL by 29.3% on average beyond scalar balancing without changing any prediction. Numerical split-prior scenarios make the remaining risk and complexity budgets explicit.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 61 of its 77 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2026.

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References · 61

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38 more
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