1% VS 100%: Parameter-Efficient Low Rank Adapter for Dense Predictions

Fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks is a standard technique for achieving state-of-the-art performance on computer vision benchmarks. However, fine-tuning the whole model with millions of parameters is inefficient as it requires storing a same-sized new model copy for each task. In this work, we propose LoRand, a method for fine-tuning large-scale vision models with a better trade-off between task performance and the number of trainable parameters. LoRand generates tiny adapter structures with low-rank synthesis while keeping the original backbone parameters fixed, resulting in high parameter sharing. To demonstrate LoRand’s effectiveness, we implement extensive experiments on object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks. By only training a small percentage (1% to 3%) of the pre-trained backbone parameters, LoRand achieves comparable performance to standard fine-tuning on COCO and ADE20K and outperforms fine-tuning in low-resource PASCAL VOC dataset.