Block Circulant Adapter for Large Language Models

Block Circulant Adapter for Large Language Models

Xinyu Ding, Meiqi Wang, Siyu Liao, Zhongfeng Wang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 5030-5038. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/560

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is difficult due to their huge model size. Recent Fourier domain-based methods show potential for reducing fine-tuning costs. We propose a block circulant matrix-based fine-tuning method with a stable training heuristic to leverage the properties of circulant matrices and one-dimensional Fourier transforms to reduce storage and computation costs. Experiments show that our method uses 14× less number of parameters than VeRA, 16× smaller than LoRA and 32× less FLOPs than FourierFT, while maintaining close or better task performance. Our approach presents a promising way in frequency domain to fine-tune large models on downstream tasks.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Deep learning architectures
Computer Vision: CV: Efficiency and Optimization
Machine Learning: ML: Matrix/tensor methods
Natural Language Processing: NLP: Language models