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Related papers: A Primer on Zeroth-Order Optimization in Signal Pr…

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As the size of large language models grows exponentially, GPU memory has become a bottleneck for adapting these models to downstream tasks. In this paper, we aim to push the limits of memory-efficient training by minimizing memory usage on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Sifeng Shang , Jiayi Zhou , Chenyu Lin , Minxian Li , Kaiyang Zhou

Bilevel optimization problems consist of minimizing a value function whose evaluation depends on the solution of an inner optimization problem. These problems are typically tackled using first-order methods that require computing the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-30 Marco Rando , Samuel Vaiter

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with zeroth-order (ZO) optimization reduces memory by approximating gradients through function evaluations. However, existing methods essentially perform updates in a one-dimensional space, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Jian Feng , Zhihong Huang

Fine-tuning large pretrained language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of modern NLP, yet its growing memory demands (driven by backpropagation and large optimizer States) limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Zero-order (ZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Valery Parfenov , Grigoriy Evseev , Andrey Veprikov , Nikolay Bushkov , Stanislav Moiseev , Aleksandr Beznosikov

Recently introduced distributed zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) algorithms have shown their utility in distributed reinforcement learning (RL). Unfortunately, in the gradient estimation process, almost all of them require random samples…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-06 Gangshan Jing , He Bai , Jemin George , Aranya Chakrabortty , Piyush K. Sharma

Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Zhendong Mi , Qitao Tan , Grace Li Zhang , Zhaozhuo Xu , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

We consider the zeroth-order optimization problem in the huge-scale setting, where the dimension of the problem is so large that performing even basic vector operations on the decision variables is infeasible. In this paper, we propose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-17 HanQin Cai , Yuchen Lou , Daniel McKenzie , Wotao Yin

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with classic first-order optimizers entails prohibitive GPU memory due to the backpropagation process. Recent works have turned to zeroth-order optimizers for fine-tuning, which save substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yanjun Zhao , Sizhe Dang , Haishan Ye , Guang Dai , Yi Qian , Ivor W. Tsang

The adaptive momentum method (AdaMM), which uses past gradients to update descent directions and learning rates simultaneously, has become one of the most popular first-order optimization methods for solving machine learning problems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-17 Xiangyi Chen , Sijia Liu , Kaidi Xu , Xingguo Li , Xue Lin , Mingyi Hong , David Cox

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Yet traditional first-order optimizers such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adam incur prohibitive memory and computational…

One of the major bottlenecks for deploying popular first-order differentially private (DP) machine learning algorithms (e.g., DP-SGD) lies in their high computation and memory cost, despite the existence of optimized implementations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Xuchen Gong , Tian Li

In this paper, we consider a distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problem, which is about minimizing a sum of $n$ local cost functions over a network with only zeroth-order information. A novel single-loop Decentralized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Hongxu Chen , Jinchi Chen , Ke Wei

Federated learning (FL), as an emerging edge artificial intelligence paradigm, enables many edge devices to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their private data. To enhance the training efficiency of FL, various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Wenzhi Fang , Ziyi Yu , Yuning Jiang , Yuanming Shi , Colin N. Jones , Yong Zhou

Differentially private zeroth-order optimization methods have recently gained popularity in private fine tuning of machine learning models due to their reduced memory requirements. Current approaches for privatizing zeroth-order methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-10 Devansh Gupta , Meisam Razaviyayn , Vatsal Sharan

We revisit the one-point feedback zeroth-order (ZO) optimization problem, a classical setting in derivative-free optimization where only a single noisy function evaluation is available per query. Compared to their two-point counterparts,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-19 Haishan Ye , Xiangyu Chang

Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-19 Feihu Huang , Bin Gu , Zhouyuan Huo , Songcan Chen , Heng Huang

Federated optimization, an emerging paradigm which finds wide real-world applications such as federated learning, enables multiple clients (e.g., edge devices) to collaboratively optimize a global function. The clients do not share their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-09 Yao Shu , Xiaoqiang Lin , Zhongxiang Dai , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

We propose and analyze a randomized zeroth-order approach based on approximating the exact gradient byfinite differences computed in a set of orthogonal random directions that changes with each iteration. A number ofpreviously proposed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-16 David Kozak , Cesare Molinari , Lorenzo Rosasco , Luis Tenorio , Silvia Villa

Zeroth-order optimization is a fundamental research topic that has been a focus of various learning tasks, such as black-box adversarial attacks, bandits, and reinforcement learning. However, in theory, most complexity results assert a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-03 Pengyun Yue , Long Yang , Cong Fang , Zhouchen Lin
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