Plasticity vs. Rigidity: The Impact of Low-Rank Adapters on Reasoning on a Micro-Budget (2026.eacl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in mathematical reasoning typically rely on massive scale . yet, can strong reasoning capabilities be induced in small language models under extreme constraints? |
| Approach: | They train small language models with a single GPU for under 24 hours . they find that adapters unlock significant plasticity in standard instruction-tuned models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model training on a single GPU (48GB) achieves 40% Pass@1 on AIME 24 (an 11.1% improvement over baseline) the model training results show that the adapter capacity and initialization are critical factors. |
Similar Papers
Low-probability Tokens Sustain Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guanhua Huang, Tingqiang Xu, Mingze Wang, Qi Yi, Xue Gong, Siheng Li, Ruibin Xiong, Kejiao Li, Yuhao Jiang, Bo Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that RLVR training is slow and results plateau as policy entropy collapses . low-probability regularization (Lp-Reg) reduces the number of low-quality exploratory tokens induced by RL training . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce RLVR over-penalization by eliminating low-probability exploratory tokens . they propose 'Low-provability Regularization' to reduce the gradual elimination of low-quality exploratory entropy tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates low-probability exploratory tokens and prevents suppression of potentially valuable low-property candidates. |
Beyond High-Entropy Exploration: Correctness-Aware Low-Entropy Segment-Based Advantage Shaping for Reasoning LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropies drive exploration and should receive stronger updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a correctness-aware reinforcement framework that performs fine-grained advantage modulation over low-entropy segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy over strong RL baselines across three backbones and six math benchmarks while maintaining high-entropy exploration. |
Steering LLM Reasoning Through Bias-Only Adaptation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Viacheslav Sinii, Alexey Gorbatovski, Artem Cherepanov, Boris Shaposhnikov, Nikita Balagansky, Daniil Gavrilov
| Challenge: | Compared with LoRA and BitFit, training a single steering vector per layer with reinforcement learning requires orders of magnitude fewer resources and isolates a much smaller, more interpretable parameter set. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a single steering vector per layer with reinforcement learning while freezing all base weights to match the accuracy of fully RL-tuned reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on an 8 billion-parameter model while keeping all base weights fixed. |
Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hoang Phan, Xianjun Yang, Yuanshun Yao, Jingyu Zhang, Shengjie Bi, Xiaocheng Tang, Madian Khabsa, Lijuan Liu, Deren Lei
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning . however, the recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, where models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves general capabilities and improves reasoning . it can be applied to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or tuning . |
GeoRA: Geometry-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation for RLVR (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing parameter-efficient methods for RLVR face limitations . low-rank adaptation methods do not account for the distinct optimization dynamics . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method tailored for RLVR that exploits the anisotropic structure of RL update subspace and extracts its principal directions via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large reasoning models show that GeoRA outperforms strong low-rank baselines across RLVR settings while showing stronger generalization and less forgetting on out-of-domain tasks. |
LoNAS: Elastic Low-Rank Adapters for Efficient Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) reach hundreds of billions of parameters and require resources for training and inference stages. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adapter to reduce the number of trainable parameters in a model and reduce memory requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces memory and compute requirements while preserving performance. |
Beyond Full Fine-tuning: Harnessing the Power of LoRA for Multi-Task Instruction Tuning (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chunlei Xin, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithm for large-scale language models. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic study of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on diverse tasks and rich resources with different learning capacities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve remarkable performance in high-resource and multi-task scenarios, even comparable to full fine-tuning. |
How Much Knowledge Can You Pack into a LoRA Adapter without Harming LLM? (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Sergey Pletenev, Maria Marina, Daniil Moskovskiy, Vasily Konovalov, Pavel Braslavski, Alexander Panchenko, Mikhail Salnikov
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a popular training technique for updating or domain-specific adaptation of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use low-rank adaptation to incorporate new facts into the LLM without compromising previously learned knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is harmful because the model's performance declines after such fine-tuning. |
Revisiting Entropy Regularization: Adaptive Coefficient Unlocks Its Potential for LLM Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reasoning ability is a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), but RLVR training suffers from policy entropy collapse, hindering exploration and limiting reasoning performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation via three components: difficulty-aware coefficient allocation, initial-anchored target entropy, and dynamic global coefficient adjustment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
Revisiting Entropy in Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Renren Jin, Pengzhi Gao, Yuqi Ren, Zhuowen Han, Tongxuan Zhang, Wuwei Huang, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a positive-advantage reweighting approach that regulates model entropy by adjusting the loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach regulates model entropy by adjusting loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training while maintaining competitive performance. |