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# BEFT: Bias-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Language Models in Low-Data Regimes

[BEFT](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15974) is a parameter efficient fine-tuning algorithm (PEFT) that only fine-tunes the added bias terms of value projections from pretrained transformer models. BEFT demonstrates that fine-tuning the added bias terms of value projections from pretrained transformers generally leads to a higher downstream performance in low-data regimes than fine-tuning the added bias terms of query/key projections.

BEFT currently has the following tradeoffs:

Pros:
- BEFT requires far fewer parameters than LoRA, while maintaining competitive or superior performance across tasks in low-data regimes.

Cons:
- In high-data regimes, BEFT may show limited effectiveness compared to LoRA and full-parameters fine-tuning.

If your use case belongs to the high-data regime, consider other PEFT methods such as LoRA.

The abstract from the paper is:

*Fine-tuning the bias terms of large language models (LLMs) has the potential to achieve unprecedented parameter efficiency while maintaining competitive performance, particularly in low-data regimes. However, the link between fine-tuning different bias terms (i.e., **b**<sub>q</sub>, **b**<sub>k</sub>, and **b**<sub>v</sub> in the query, key, or value projections) and downstream performance remains largely unclear to date. In this paper, we investigate the link between fine-tuning **b**<sub>q</sub>, **b**<sub>k</sub>, and **b**<sub>v</sub> with the performance of the downstream task. Our key finding is that directly fine-tuning **b**<sub>v</sub> generally leads to higher downstream performance in low-data regimes, in comparison to **b**<sub>q</sub> and **b**<sub>k</sub>. We extensively evaluate this unique property across a wide range of LLMs spanning encoder-only and decoder-only architectures up to 6.7B parameters (including bias-free LLMs). Our results provide strong evidence for the effectiveness of directly fine-tuning **b**<sub>v</sub> across various downstream tasks*.

## Benchmark overview

<iframe
	src="https://peft-internal-testing-peft-method-comparison-embed.hf.space/?highlight[type]=BEFT"
	frameborder="0"
	width="850"
	height="1000"
></iframe>

# API

## BeftConfig

[[autodoc]] tuners.beft.config.BeftConfig

## BeftModel

[[autodoc]] tuners.beft.model.BeftModel
