Parameter Efficiency Is Not Memory Efficiency: Rethinking Fine-Tuning for On-Device LLM Adaptation

arXiv:2604.22783v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become the standard for adapting large language models (LLMs). In this work we challenge the wide-spread assumption that parameter efficiency equates memory efficiency and on-device adaptability. We show that this is not true - while methods like LoRA and IA3 significantly reduce trainable parameters, they remain bound by intermediate tensors that scale linearly with sequence length, often triggering out