Abstract: The rapid scaling of large language models necessitates more lightweight finetuning methods to reduce the explosive GPU memory overhead when numerous customized models are served simultaneously.Targeting more parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA), parameter sharing presents a promising solution. Empirically, our research into high-level sharing principles highlights the indispensable role of differentiation in reversing the detrimental effects of pure sharing.Guided by this finding, we propose Mixture of Shards (MoS), incorporating both inter-layer and intra-layer sharing schemes, and integrating four nearly cost-free differentiation strategies, namely subset selection, pair dissociation, vector sharding, and shard privatization. Briefly, it selects a designated number of shards from global pools with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-like routing mechanism before sequentially concatenating them to low-rank matrices.Hence, it retains all the advantages of LoRA while offering enhanced parameter efficiency, and effectively circumvents the drawbacks of peer parameter-sharing methods.Our empirical experiments demonstrate approximately $8\times$ parameter savings in a standard LoRA setting. The ablation study confirms the significance of each component.Our insights into parameter sharing and MoS method may illuminate future developments of more parameter-efficient finetuning methods.The code is officially available at https://github.com/Forence1999/MoS.