TuckA: Hierarchical Compact Tensor Experts for Efficient Fine-Tuning

Abstract Efficiently fine-tuning pre-trained models for downstream tasks is a key challenge in the era of foundation models. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) presents a promising solution, achieving performance comparable to full fine-tuning by updating only a small number of adaptation weights per layer. Traditional PEFT methods typically rely on a single expert, where the adaptation weight is a low-rank matrix. However, for complex tasks, the data's inherent diversity poses a significant challenge for such models, as a single adaptation weight cannot adequately capture the features of all samples. To address this limitation, we explore how to integrate multiple small adaptation experts into a compact structure to defeat a large adapter. Specifically, we propose Tucker Adaptation (TuckA), a method with four key properties: (i) We use Tucker decomposition to create a compact 3D tensor where each slice naturally serves as an expert. The low-rank nature of this decomposition ensures that the number of parameters scales efficiently as more experts are added. (ii) We introduce a hierarchical strategy that organizes these experts into groups at different granularities, allowing the model to capture both local and global data patterns. (iii) We develop an efficient batch-level routing mechanism, which reduces the router's parameter size by a factor of L compared to routing at every adapted layer (where L is the number of adapted layers) (iv) We propose data-aware initialization to achieve loss-free expert load balancing based on theoretical analysis. Extensive experiments on benchmarks in natural language understanding, image classification, and mathematical reasoning speak to the efficacy of TuckA, offering a new and effective solution to the PEFT problem.