Parameter-Efficient Temporal Domain Generalization
Abstract
Temporal domain generalization (TDG) learns from a sequence of observed domains to predict models for unseen future domains. Existing parameter-dynamics methods become prohibitively expensive at modern backbone scales because their temporal encoders and generators operate on the entire adapted parameter state. Replacing full-model updates with LoRA does not remove this failure mode: the dynamics model must still encode and reconstruct every adapter parameter, making the auxiliary model itself prohibitively large for modern backbones. We propose Low-rank Time-varying Core (LoTiC), a parameter-efficient TDG method that decomposes temporal updates into shared low-rank bases and a compact core. The bases define a stable update subspace, while only the core evolves. LoTiC therefore learns temporal dynamics in an r*r space instead of tracking the full adapter. We justify this factorization through the geometry of parameter increments and support continuous, recurrent, and time-conditioned core models. Experiments span six controlled and real-world benchmarks, three data modalities, classification and generation, and backbones from 66M to 8B parameters. LoTiC ranks first in 14 of 15 settings, including near-perfect future-domain accuracy with an 8B backbone on Rotating 2-Moons. It adds only 0.13--0.51% trainable parameters beyond LoRA and trains 1.8--7.1$\times$ faster than parameter-dynamics baselines. These results establish that temporal parameter dynamics can remain both learnable and efficient as pretrained backbones scale.
