META-LORA: Memory-Efficient Sample Reweighting for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models

Abstract

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely adopted for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific downstream tasks. However, the substantial computational demands of LLMs hinder iterative exploration of fine-tuning datasets and accurate evaluation of individual sample importance. To address this challenge, we introduce Meta-LoRA, a memory-efficient method for automatic sample reweighting. Meta-LoRA learns to reweight fine-tuning samples by minimizing the loss on a small, high-quality validation set through an end-to-end bi-level optimization framework based on meta-learning. To reduce memory usage associated with computing second derivatives, we approximate the bi-level optimization using gradient similarity between training and validation datasets, replacing bi-dimensional gradient similarity with the product of one-dimensional activation states and their corresponding gradients. Further memory optimization is achieved by refining gradient computations, selectively applying them to the low-rank layers of LoRA, which results in as little as 4% additional memory usage. Comprehensive evaluations across benchmark datasets in mathematics, coding, and medical domains demonstrate Meta-LoRA’s superior efficacy and efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/liweicheng-ai/meta-lora.