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LoRA / QLoRA
Low-Rank Adaptation / Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation
Phase 02 · LLM Fundamentalstechnique

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods that freeze main model weights and only train tiny low-rank adapter matrices.

Why it exists

Full fine-tuning of 70B models requires massive GPU clusters. LoRA reduces trainable parameters by 99% so fine-tuning runs on a single consumer GPU.

How it works

Freezes main weights W and adds trainable rank-decomposition matrices A and B. QLoRA quantizes W to 4-bit while training adapters in higher precision.

Where you'll use this