Bayesian Sparse Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Model Uncertainty Estimation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities, but their task-specific fine-tuning is notoriously plagued by overconfidence, severely hindering trustworthy deployment. We propose Data-Adaptive Lower-Rank Adaptation (DALorRA), a simple and effective variational Bayesian sparse framework that shifts the paradigm of uncertainty quantification from the dense parameter space to the lightweight rank level of low-rank adaptation (LoRA). With the insight that LoRA essentially aggregates multiple rank-one components that may provide superfluous model capacity, DALorRA imposes stochastic masking on rank dimensions, enabling Bayesian regularization of model capacity during training and ensemble-like calibration during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate DALorRA's excellent calibration of LLMs without compromising reasoning accuracy.