LoCo: Low-Rank Compositional Rotation Fine-Tuning

LoCo: Low-Rank Compositional Rotation Fine-Tuning

An Nguyen, Jaesik Choi, Anh Tong

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4678-4686. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/521

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as an critical technique for adapting large-scale foundation models across natural language processing and computer vision. While existing methods such as low-rank adaptations achieve parameter efficiency via low-rank weight updates, they are limited in their ability to preserve the geometric structure of pretrained representations. We introduce Low-rank Compositional Orthogonal fine-tuning (LoCO), a novel PEFT method that constructs orthogonal transformations through low-rank skew-symmetric matrices and compositional rotation chains. We propose an approximation scheme that enables fully parallel computation of compositional rotations, making the approach practical for high-dimensional feature spaces. Our method maintains low computational complexity while maintaining orthogonality with controlled approximation error. We validate LoCO across diverse domains, including diffusion transformer fine-tuning, vision transformer adaptation, and language model adaptation. Our approach demonstrates superior or competitive performance compared to both existing orthogonal and non-orthogonal baselines.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Generative models
Machine Learning: Learnware/model reuse/transfer learning
Natural Language Processing: Language generation