The other recent improvement suggested for LoRA is DoRA: https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/lora-and-dora-from-s.... It really does seem to strongly outperform LoRA - see also https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-04-26-fsdp-qdora-llama3.htm...
Interestingly both seem to indirectly modify the optimisation process, in my opinion effectively trying to fix a bad optimiser. Seems like we still have a long way to go after Adam...
A preprint in arxiv suggests that Adam works better than SGD for training LLMs due to the issue of class-imbalance [0]. It appears that scaling the gradient step helps with the training, for example, see another approach suggested in [1].
0. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.19449 1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.02347