{"paper":{"title":"LoCA: Forward-Only LLM Tuning after One-Shot Calibration with Local Credit Assignment","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Binrui Shen, Linhan Xia, Rui Liu, Shengxin Zhu, Yihao Wang, Zhaofeng Zhang","submitted_at":"2026-08-04T02:06:43Z","abstract_excerpt":"Parameter-efficient post-training reduces the number of trainable parameters, but still requires repeated end-to-end backpropagation through the frozen backbone. Every adaptation step therefore needs backward-capable hardware and must store or recompute activations. We ask whether this repeated backward chain can be replaced by a one-time calibration. We introduce Local Credit Assignment (LoCA), a two-stage method for small-shift adaptation. One probe backward pass fits a low-rank map at each transformer block from the final prediction error to a local hidden-state correction. LoCA then reuses"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.03020","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2608.03020/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}