BA-LoRA: Bias-Alleviating Low-Rank Adaptation to Mitigate Catastrophic Inheritance in Large Language Models

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, adapting LLMs to downstream applications requires computationally intensive and memory-demanding fine-tuning procedures. To alleviate these burdens, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques have emerged as a promising approach to tailor LLMs with minimal computational overhead. While PEFT methods offer substantial advantages, they do not fully address the pervasive issue of bias propagation from pre-training data. This work introduces Bias-Alleviating Low-Rank Adaptation (BA-LoRA), a novel PEFT method designed to counteract bias inheritance. BA-LoRA incorporates three distinct regularization terms: (1) a consistency regularizer, (2) a diversity regularizer, and (3) a singular value decomposition regularizer. These regularizers aim to enhance the models' consistency, diversity, and generalization capabilities during fine-tuning. We conduct extensive experiments on natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) tasks using prominent LLMs such as LLaMA, Mistral, and Gemma. The results demonstrate that BA-LoRA outperforms LoRA and its state-of-the-art variants. Moreover, our method effectively mitigates the adverse effects of pre-training bias, leading to more reliable and robust model outputs. The code is available at https://github.com/cyp-jlu-ai/BA-LoRA.