CVAILGIVSPMay 18, 2025

Exploring Sparsity for Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning Using Wavelets

arXiv:2505.12532v24 citationsh-index: 62Has Code
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This addresses the need for more efficient adaptation of large foundation models under tight compute and memory budgets, particularly for extreme parameter-efficient scenarios, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing PEFT methods.

The paper tackled the problem of limited granularity and effectiveness in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA by proposing Wavelet Fine-Tuning (WaveFT), which learns sparse updates in the wavelet domain to allow precise control of trainable parameters and significantly outperforms LoRA and other PEFT methods in personalized text-to-image generation, especially at low parameter counts.

Efficiently adapting large foundation models is critical, especially with tight compute and memory budgets. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods such as LoRA offer limited granularity and effectiveness in few-parameter regimes. We propose Wavelet Fine-Tuning (WaveFT), a novel PEFT method that learns highly sparse updates in the wavelet domain of residual matrices. WaveFT allows precise control of trainable parameters, offering fine-grained capacity adjustment and excelling with remarkably low parameter count, potentially far fewer than LoRA's minimum, ideal for extreme parameter-efficient scenarios. Evaluated on personalized text-to-image generation using Stable Diffusion XL as baseline, WaveFT significantly outperforms LoRA and other PEFT methods, especially at low parameter counts; achieving superior subject fidelity, prompt alignment, and image diversity.

Code Implementations1 repo
Foundations

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