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TrainingEfficiency Updated 2026

LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)

A parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that adapts a large model by training small added matrices while keeping the original weights frozen.

LoRA, introduced by Hu et al. (2021), freezes the pre-trained weights and injects small trainable low-rank matrices into each layer. Only those tiny matrices are updated, cutting the number of trained parameters by orders of magnitude and the memory cost of fine-tuning dramatically — with little loss in quality.

Because the adapters are small and swappable, LoRA makes it cheap to maintain many task- or customer-specific variants of one base model.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
Hu, E. J., Shen, Y., Wallis, P., Allen-Zhu, Z., Li, Y., Wang, S., Wang, L., & Chen, W. (2021). International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022).

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/lora

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