Recursively re-factorising LoRA and DoRA trainable parameters cut them by roughly an order of magnitude while holding task performance, and beat the originals on average across eight commonsense benchmarks
AspireAI community · arXiv (cs.CL)
This work takes the trainable parameters of existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and compresses them again: the parameters are reorganised into an approximately square matrix and expressed through a low-rank decomposition that is applied recursively, level by level. Combined with LoRA, DoRA, MoSA and RaSA, the method performs better than the baselines at comparable trainable-parameter budgets, and when the original methods' parameter counts are cut by roughly an order of magnitude it still holds competitive task performance and surpasses the corresponding baselines on average accuracy across eight commonsense reasoning benchmarks. The evaluation is on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Qwen2.5-7B for commonsense reasoning with extra GSM8K runs on LLaMA-3.1-8B, so the compression claim is demonstrated on those two model families rather than at frontier scale.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.