用压缩激活重构技术,让LoRA在低内存下仍能高效微调大模型。
CARE-LoRA: Compressed Activation REconstruction for Memory-Efficient LoRA

- 用LoRA分支的低秩压缩激活替代完整输入激活
- 仅增加少量计算开销,显存占用减少超50%
- 适合资源受限场景下的大模型微调,如边缘设备
随着大模型规模持续扩大,在有限内存条件下进行微调变得愈发困难。当前广泛使用的参数高效微调方法低秩适配(LoRA)通过仅优化低秩矩阵,大幅减少了可训练参数数量。然而,反向传播所需的激活值成为新的主要内存瓶颈。为此,我们提出CARE-LoRA——一种数据感知的压缩激活重构框架。利用LoRA固有的投影结构,该方法在前向传播中用LoRA分支自然产生的低秩压缩激活替代完整输入激活,并在前向过程中以可忽略的额外开销计算一个轻量级重构矩阵,用于反向传播时重建梯度信号,从而保持LoRA矩阵完全可训练。在多种模型和下游任务上的大量实验表明,尽管整体内存占用显著降低,CARE-LoRA仍能达到甚至优于标准LoRA及代表性变体的性能。代码已开源:https://github.com/fishandyu/CARE-LoRA。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As the scale of large pre-trained models continues to grow, fine-tuning them under limited memory budgets has become increasingly challenging. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), currently one of the most widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, mitigates this challenge by optimizing only low-rank adaptation matrices, thereby greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters. With the parameter overhead substantially reduced, the activations retained for backpropagation have emerged as the primary remaining memory bottleneck during LoRA fine-tuning. To address this, we propose CARE-LoRA, a data-aware Compressed Activation REconstruction framework. By exploiting the inherent projection structure of LoRA, CARE-LoRA replaces the full input activation with the low-rank compressed activation naturally produced by the LoRA branch. It further computes a lightweight reconstruction matrix during the forward pass with negligible additional computation cost, which is used during backpropagation to reconstruct the gradient signal, thereby keeping LoRA matrices fully trainable. Extensive experiments across diverse models and downstream tasks demonstrate that, while substantially reducing the overall memory footprint, CARE-LoRA achieves competitive or even superior performance compared with standard LoRA and representative LoRA variants. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/fishandyu/CARE-LoRA .
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