  The scalability of deep learning models is fundamentally limited by computing
resources, memory, and communication. Although methods like low-rank adaptation
(LoRA) have reduced the cost of model finetuning, its application in model
pre-training remains largely unexplored. This paper explores extending LoRA to
model pre-training, identifying the inherent constraints and limitations of
standard LoRA in this context. We introduce LoRA-the-Explorer (LTE), a novel
bi-level optimization algorithm designed to enable parallel training of
multiple low-rank heads across computing nodes, thereby reducing the need for
frequent synchronization. Our approach includes extensive experimentation on
vision transformers using various vision datasets, demonstrating that LTE is
competitive with standard pre-training.
