Asked about A LoRA adapter from scratch
You are serving fifty different fine-tunes of one base model. Merged or unmerged?
An answer that works
Unmerged. Fifty merged models is fifty copies of the base weights in memory, where fifty adapters at r=16 are a few tens of megabytes each on top of one shared base, and the adapter can be switched per request in a batch. The cost is the extra low-rank matmul per layer, which is small because it runs at rank r rather than full width. Merge when you are serving one adapter at high volume and want the last of the latency.
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