LoRA Recycle: Unlocking Tuning-Free Few-Shot Adaptability in Visual Foundation Models by Recycling Pre-Tuned LoRAs

Zixuan Hu, Yongxian Wei, Li Shen, Chun Yuan, Dacheng Tao; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 25026-25037

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT demonstrate strong few-shot adaptability without requiring fine-tuning, positioning them ideal for data-limited and real-time applications. However, this adaptability has not yet been replicated in current Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), which require explicit fine-tuning with sufficient tuning data. Besides, the pretraining-finetuning paradigm has led to the surge of numerous task-specific modular components, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). For the first time, we explore the potential of reusing diverse pre-tuned LoRAs without accessing their original training data, to achieve tuning-free few-shot adaptation in VFMs. Our framework, LoRA Recycle, distills a meta-LoRA from diverse pre-tuned LoRAs with a meta-learning objective, using synthetic data inversely generated from pre-tuned LoRAs themselves. The VFM, once equipped with the meta-LoRA, is empowered to solve new few-shot tasks in a single forward pass, akin to the in-context learning of LLMs. Additionally, we incorporate a double-efficient mechanism, accelerating the data-generation and meta-training process while maintaining or even improving performance. Extensive experiments across various few-shot classification benchmarks across both in- and cross-domain scenarios demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Code is available at https://github.com/Egg-Hu/LoRA-Recycle.