LARA: small, composable behaviours for frozen LLMs [P]

Reddit r/MachineLearning 09/16/26, 01:28 PM Papers

low-rank-adaptation modular-ai frozen-llms composable-behaviors pytorch research ai-training

Summary

LARA is a research project and PyTorch library that enables modular, composable behaviors for frozen large language models using low-rank residual adapters, allowing efficient training and inference-time blending of multiple behaviors.

GitHub: https://github.com/pfekin/LARA I've been working on LARA (Lightweight Additive Residual Adaptation), a research project on making post-training modular for frozen language models. I've also developed a small PyTorch library that implements it. The main idea is to train a low-rank residual adapter at selected layers rather than modifying the model's weights. The resulting behaviors are small enough to keep separately and can be loaded, removed, blended or routed at inference time. The Mixture of Behaviors (MoBs) demo is maybe the easiest way to see what this means in practice. Several independently trained behaviors can share the same frozen model, with a soft router selecting or combining them on a token by token basis. For example, a single model can have separate coding, maths, medical and summmarization behaviors rather than keeping four separately adapted models. The repository also includes a comparison with LoRA and some writing style behaviors trained on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein (second demo). It's an on-going research project, but the library is usable now and includes the training code, examples and reproduction instructions (for the paper).

Original Article

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