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Spectral Transformation for Layer-wise Global Rank Discovery in Federated LoRA for Vision Transformers

Research Efficiency & Systems

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TL;DR - SpecTraL improves federated LoRA fine-tuning of Vision Transformers by aggregating adapters in low-rank latent space and automatically selecting global ranks per layer. It aims to reduce communication and server computation while improving convergence under heterogeneous client data.

  • Uses orthonormal Householder transformations to avoid mathematically inconsistent factor averaging and dense update reconstruction.
  • Applies a spiked covariance model to distinguish shared signal from non-IID noise and determine layer-wise ranks without hyperparameter search.
  • Introduces padding-aware initialization so clients can adopt residual LoRA dimensions without merging updates into base-model weights.
  • Experiments on ViT-B/16 and ViT-L/16 with DomainNet and NICO++ show improved accuracy–communication trade-offs and lower server overhead.

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Spectral Transformation for Layer-wise Global Rank Discovery in Federated LoRA for Vision Transformers

arXiv cs.LG Hariharan Ramesh, Jyotikrishna Dass 2026-07-23 arXiv:2607.21074
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-03 14:15:04.210202 UTC

TL;DR - SpecTraL improves federated LoRA fine-tuning of Vision Transformers by aggregating adapters in low-rank latent space and automatically selecting global ranks per layer. It aims to reduce communication and server computation while improving convergence under heterogeneous client data.

  • Uses orthonormal Householder transformations to avoid mathematically inconsistent factor averaging and dense update reconstruction.
  • Applies a spiked covariance model to distinguish shared signal from non-IID noise and determine layer-wise ranks without hyperparameter search.
  • Introduces padding-aware initialization so clients can adopt residual LoRA dimensions without merging updates into base-model weights.
  • Experiments on ViT-B/16 and ViT-L/16 with DomainNet and NICO++ show improved accuracy–communication trade-offs and lower server overhead.
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