Which LoRA? An Empirical Study on the Effectiveness of LoRA Techniques During Multilingual Instruction Tuning
Thamali Wijewardhana, Napoleon H. Reyes, Surangika Ranathunga
Abstract
We investigate whether commonly available LoRA variants have an advantage over basic LoRA in multilingual instruction tuning. Experiments involving LoRA and four other variants on two datasets across diverse target languages show that there is no significant advantage in using more complex LoRA variants instead of basic LoRA, with respect to balancing cross-lingual transfer and knowledge retention. An analysis of hidden embeddings reveal that layer-wise language representation remains largely similar across LLMs fine-tuned with different LoRA techniques, suggesting that architectural novelty of LoRA techniques may not translate into better cross-lingual adaptation.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.