Frozen Cores Need Task Signal: Fisher-Whitened Cross-Covariance for Low-Resource LLM Adaptation
FCCA, which estimates the signed input--error cross-covariance, whitens it with diagonal Fisher moments, truncates it in the resulting local metric, maps the selected directions back, and applies thin QR to obtain stable core coordinates, shows that a carefully selected fixed span can recover most of the benefit of movable low-rank factors at a much smaller trainable and optimizer-state cost.