LoRA vs QLoRA for LLM Fine-Tuning: VRAM, Quality, and Deployment Costs

The LoRA vs QLoRA decision comes down to VRAM budget versus quality. LoRA keeps the base model in full precision and trains small adapter matrices on top. It needs more memory, but it recovers most of what full fine-tuning gives you. QLoRA quantizes the frozen model to 4-bit first, which is why it…