Geo-LoRA: Geometry-Aware Subspace Evolution for Low-Rank Adaptation in Continual Learning

Abstract

Rehearsal-free class-incremental learning (CIL) with LoRA adapters remains challenging because the low-rank subspaces updated across tasks evolve without geometric control, causing unstable shared representations and repetitive collapse of task-specific updates into previously occupied directions. We introduce Geo-LoRA, a geometry-aware framework that explicitly regulates how low-rank subspaces, both shared and task-specific, evolve during continual learning. For the shared branch, Subspace Projection Preservation (SPP) constrains consecutive updates to follow smooth trajectories on the Grassmann manifold, and Adaptive Core-Slack Alignment (ACSA) decomposes transitions into principal and residual components, aligning the former while modulating the latter to balance stability and plasticity. For the task-specific branch, Median-Calibrated Block Overlap (MCBO) imposes a statistical constraint via normalized projection overlap, penalizing excessive reuse to mitigate subspace crowding. These constraints jointly regulate the evolution of all LoRA subspaces across layers and tasks without introducing additional adapter types beyond standard LoRA. Geo-LoRA provides a principled geometric formulation for continual low-rank adaptation and consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmark datasets and different task lengths.