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LoRA Fine-Tuning Without GPUs (arxiv.org)
1 point by elashri on Jul 3, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of training new adapters with gradients on a GPU, it builds them by mixing a bank of existing ones based on the task's data, all on a laptop CPU. The result beats the base model but still trails GPU-trained adapters.

Abstract · LoRA Fine-Tuning Without GPUs: A CPU-Efficient Meta-Generation Framework for LLMs

Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) have transformed the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling parameter-efficient updates. However, their widespread adoption remains limited by the reliance on GPU-based training. In this work, we propose a theoretically grounded approach to LoRA fine-tuning designed specifically for users with limited computational resources, particularly those restricted to standard laptop CPUs. Our method learns a meta-operator that maps any input dataset, represented as a probability distribution, to a set of LoRA weights by leveraging a large bank of pre-trained adapters for the Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 model. Instead of performing new gradient-based updates, our pipeline constructs adapters via lightweight combinations of existing LoRAs directly on CPU. While the resulting adapters do not match the performance of GPU-trained counterparts, they consistently outperform the base Mistral model on downstream tasks, offering a practical and accessible alternative to traditional GPU-based fine-tuning.

Reza Arabpour, Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde, Anastasis Kratsios
arXiv:2507.01806 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, stat.ML · submitted Jul 2, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 5-page main paper (excluding references) + 11-page appendix, 3 tables, 1 figure. Accepted to ICML 2025 Workshop on Efficient Systems for Foundation Models

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