LoRA

Fine-tuning by training a small number of added parameters instead of updating the whole model.

Also known as low-rank adaptation

Rather than adjusting billions of weights, LoRA inserts small low-rank matrices and trains only those. The result is dramatically cheaper to train and store, and adapters can be swapped per task.

It is the reason fine-tuning is accessible at all outside large labs, and why serving many task-specific variants from one base model is practical.