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lora-lite/docs/developer_guide.md
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# Developer guide
This is the implementation note for people adding adapter variants. The README is only for prospective users.
## Design principles
- Variants own adapter math.
- The runtime owns targeting, parameter attachment, hooks, and save/load.
- Adapter parameters live directly on target layers as `lora_*` parameters.
- Save/load uses normal full-path `state_dict()` keys filtered by `"lora_"`.
- Fail loudly on unsupported weight semantics. No silent quantized PiSSA or merge fallback.
## Variant contract
A variant is a registered class with a small static interface:
```python
@register
class MyVariant:
name = "myvariant"
@staticmethod
def param_specs(d_in, d_out, cfg) -> dict[str, ParamSpec]:
return {"lora_A": ParamSpec((cfg.r, d_in), init="kaiming")}
@staticmethod
def init(layer, cfg) -> None:
...
@staticmethod
def forward(layer, x, y):
return y_new
```
Pseudocode for the runtime:
```python
def attach(model, cfg):
targets find_linear_like_modules(model, cfg)
freeze(model.parameters())
for name, layer in targets:
layer.lora_* variant.param_specs(layer, cfg)
variant.init(layer, cfg)
hook(layer, lambda x, y: variant.forward(layer, x, y))
def save(model, path):
torch.save({"cfg": cfg, "state": state_dict_keys_containing("lora_")}, path)
```
## Data-calibrated init
LoRA, PiSSA, DeLoRA, and IA3 only use `layer.weight` or identity constants for init.
Variants that need data, e.g. AntiPaSTO, LoRA-GA, or activation-aware SVD, should keep dataloaders out of `cfg` so adapter checkpoints stay serializable:
```python
ll.attach(model, cfg, calibration_data=calib)
```
Activation-aware variants implement `group_init(model, targets, cfg, calibration_data)`. The variant may add temporary hooks, run calibration batches, remove hooks, then write `lora_*` params. `load()` should not require calibration data.
## Current limitations
| Feature | Current choice |
|---|---|
| merge/unmerge | reload the base model if vanilla weights are needed |
| multiple named adapters | one variant per `attach()` |
| mixed-adapter batches | out of scope until needed |
| quantized PiSSA | fail-fast; explicit dequantize/requantize required |
| AdaLoRA rank scheduling | needs a future `Variant.on_step(step)` hook |
| ReFT-style interventions | likely a sibling module or different hook site |
## Adapter roadmap
| Variant | Fit to current runtime | Status |
|---|---|---|
| LoRA | Hook-only additive low-rank. | Done. Tested. |
| PiSSA | Mutates `layer.weight` into `W_res`; identity via SVD round-trip. | Done. fp-only. Tested. |
| DeLoRA | Per-input-channel weight-norm scale, per-rank A/B normalization, learned `lambda`. | Done. Tested. |
| IA3 / IA3_FF | Output gate (k/v) and input gate (down_proj) variants, init to ones. | Done. Tested. |
| DoRA | Reads dense `weight` for `||V||_c`; bias passes through unscaled. | Done. fp-only. Tested. |
| HRA | Householder product applied via `forward_input` pre-hook; bnb-friendly. | Done. Tested. |
| EVA | LoRA forward; `lora_A` init from PCA on calibration activations via `group_init`. | Done. fp-only. Tested. |
| AntiPaSTO | Top-r weight SVD, learnable singular-value deltas + block-diagonal Cayley rotation. | Done. fp-only. Tested. |
| SSVD | Could fit the weight-SVD init path. | Planned. |
| OFT / ROAD | Block-diagonal rotations; needs clearer hook-only formulation. | Planned. |