SeqLoRA: Bilevel Orthogonal Adaptation for Continual Multi-Concept Generation

Abstract:Parameter-efficient fine-tuning enables fast personalization of text-to-image diffusion models to user-provided concepts (objects, people, or styles), but composing multiple such concepts remains challenging due to representation interference. Existing modular methods, usually built on low-rank adaptation (LoRA), either rely on expensive post-hoc fusion or freeze the LoRA adaptation subspaces, which limit expressiveness and concept fidelity. To address this trade-off, we propose Sequential regularized LoRA (SeqLoRA), a constrained continual learning framework that jointly optimizes both LoRA factors via bilevel optimization while keeping each new basis orthogonal to all previously learned ones. Theoretically, we establish monotone descent and convergence to a critical point of the constrained problem, and model the residual layer activations as a matrix sub-Gaussian process to derive a high-probability bound on catastrophic forgetting in multi-layer nonlinear networks. This bound depends on the basis only through a residual interference energy, and within the feasible subspace we prove that a data-adapted basis minimizes it, whereas a random frozen basis is suboptimal in expectation. Experiments on Stable Diffusion with up to 101 concepts show that SeqLoRA improves identity preservation over fusion-based methods, attains the lowest cross-concept leakage in multi-concept compositions, requires no fusion step, and scales to concept counts at which fusion runs out of memory.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2605.22743 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2605.22743v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.22743 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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