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Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs under strict memory constraints, as it avoids the prohibitive memory cost of storing activations for backpropagation. However, existing ZO methods…

As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…

Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO) provides powerful tools for optimizing functions where explicit gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. However, the underlying mechanisms of popular ZOO methods, particularly those employing…

Zeroth-order (ZO, also known as derivative-free) methods, which estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, have attracted much attention recently because of its broad applications in machine learning community. The two function…

We investigate accelerated zeroth-order algorithms for smooth composite convex optimization problems. While for unconstrained optimization, existing methods that merge 2-point zeroth-order gradient estimators with first-order frameworks…

We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

Single-point zeroth-order optimization (SZO) is useful in solving online black-box optimization and control problems in time-varying environments, as it queries the function value only once at each time step. However, the vanilla SZO method…

Fine-tuning is powerful for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, but it often results in huge memory usages. A promising approach to mitigate this is using Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, which estimates gradients to replace…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has demonstrated remarkable promise in efficient fine-tuning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs). In particular, recent advances incorporate the low-rankness of gradients, introducing low-rank ZO estimators…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has long been favored for its biological plausibility and its capacity to handle non-differentiable objectives, yet its computational complexity has historically limited its application in deep neural…

Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…

Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning demands significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…

In this work we address the problem of convex optimization in a multi-agent setting where the objective is to minimize the mean of local cost functions whose derivatives are not available (e.g. black-box models). Moreover agents can only…

Zeroth-Order optimization presents a promising memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models by relying solely on forward passes. However, its practical adoption is severely constrained by slow wall-clock convergence and…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is a memory-efficient strategy for fine-tuning Large Language Models using only forward passes. However, the application of ZO fine-tuning in memory-constrained settings such as mobile phones and laptops is…

This paper investigates zeroth-order (ZO) finite-sum composite optimization. Recently, variance reduction techniques have been applied to ZO methods to mitigate the non-vanishing variance of 2-point estimators in constrained/composite…

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,…

Language Models (LLMs) are often quantized to lower precision to reduce the memory cost and latency in inference. However, quantization often degrades model performance, thus fine-tuning is required for various down-stream tasks.…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across numerous NLP tasks. Nevertheless, conventional first-order fine-tuning techniques impose heavy memory demands, creating practical obstacles to real-world…