[2603.21970] Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Medical Text Summarization: A Comparative Study of Lora, Prompt Tuning, and Full Fine-Tuning

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2603.21970 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Mar 2026] Title:Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Medical Text Summarization: A Comparative Study of Lora, Prompt Tuning, and Full Fine-Tuning Authors:Ulugbek Shernazarov, Rostislav Svitsov, Bin Shi View a PDF of the paper titled Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Medical Text Summarization: A Comparative Study of Lora, Prompt Tuning, and Full Fine-Tuning, by Ulugbek Shernazarov and 1 other authors View PDF Abstract:Fine-tuning large language models for domain-specific tasks such as medical text summarization demands substantial computational resources. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods offer promising alternatives by updating only a small fraction of parameters. This paper compares three adaptation approaches-Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Prompt Tuning, and Full Fine-Tuning-across the Flan-T5 model family on the PubMed medical summarization dataset. Through experiments with multiple random seeds, we demonstrate that LoRA consistently outperforms full fine-tuning, achieving 43.52 +/- 0.18 ROUGE-1 on Flan-T5-Large with only 0.6% trainable parameters compared to 40.67 +/- 0.21 for full fine-tuning. Sensitivity analyses examine the impact of LoRA rank and prompt token count. Our findings suggest the low-rank constraint provides beneficial regularization, challenging assumptions about the necessity of full parameter updates. Code is available at this https URL Comments: Subjects: C...