Papers › On Fairness of Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Models
On Fairness of Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Models
Zhoujie Ding, Ken Ziyu Liu, Pura Peetathawatchai, Berivan Isik, Sanmi Koyejo
Low-rank adaptation of large models, particularly LoRA, has gained traction due to its computational efficiency. This efficiency, contrasted with the prohibitive costs of full-model fine-tuning, means that practitioners often turn to LoRA and sometimes without a complete understanding of its ramifications. In this study, we focus on fairness and ask whether LoRA has an unexamined impact on utility, calibration, and resistance to membership inference across different subgroups (e.g., genders, races, religions) compared to a full-model fine-tuning baseline. We present extensive experiments across vision and language domains and across classification and generation tasks using ViT-Base, Swin-v2-Large, Llama-2 7B, and Mistral 7B. Intriguingly, experiments suggest that while one can isolate cases where LoRA exacerbates model bias across subgroups, the pattern is inconsistent -- in many cases, LoRA has equivalent or even improved fairness compared to the base model or its full fine-tuning baseline. We also examine the complications of evaluating fine-tuning fairness relating to task design and model token bias, calling for more careful fairness evaluations in future work.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections