DEV Community

Cover image for One base model, five LoRA adapters: serving multiple fine-tuned tasks without five deployments
PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

One base model, five LoRA adapters: serving multiple fine-tuned tasks without five deployments

#finetuning #lora #serving

A team fine-tuned five separate small models for five separate tasks and then discovered they couldn't afford to host five GPU instances. The fix: one base model, five LoRA adapters, swapped per request.

How it works

Because a LoRA adapter is a small set of additional weights layered onto a frozen base model, several adapters can be loaded in the same process and swapped — or even batched together — per incoming request, instead of loading five entire fine-tuned models into memory.

  • Serving frameworks built for this (adapter-aware inference servers) batch requests across different adapters efficiently.
  • Swap latency for a single adapter is typically low enough for interactive use, but benchmark it on your own hardware before committing.
  • This only works if all five tasks share the same base model — you can't mix adapters trained on different base models.

See merging LoRA adapters and serving for the alternative — merging one adapter permanently — and when that's the better choice instead.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

Pranjul Rathour presenting with a microphone in front of a slide reading 'Now what's the conclusion?'
Presenting to a room

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

Top comments (0)