COLORA: Efficient Fine-Tuning for Convolutional Models with a Study Case on Optical Coherence Tomography Image Classification

We introduce the Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation (CoLoRA) method, designed explicitly to overcome the inefficiencies found in current CNN fine-tuning methods. CoLoRA can be seen as a natural extension of the convolutional architectures of the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) technique. We demonstrate the capabilities of our method by developing and evaluating models using the widely adopted CNN backbone pre-trained on ImageNet. We observed that this strategy results in a stable and accurate coarse-tuning procedure. Moreover, this strategy is computationally efficient and significantly reduces the number of parameters required for fine-tuning compared to traditional methods. Furthermore, our method substantially improves the speed and stability of training. Our case study focuses on classifying retinal diseases from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images, specifically using the OCTMNIST dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that a CNN backbone fine-tuned with CoLoRA surpasses nearly 1\% in accuracy. Such a performance is comparable to the Vision Transformer, State-space discrete, and Kolmogorov-Arnold network models.