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The confluence of Federated Learning (FL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) is ushering in a new era in privacy-preserving natural language processing. However, the intensive memory requirements for fine-tuning LLMs pose significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhenqing Ling , Daoyuan Chen , Liuyi Yao , Yaliang Li , Ying Shen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zhendong Mi , Qitao Tan , Xiaodong Yu , Zining Zhu , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) but demand massive GPU resources for training. Lowering the threshold for LLMs training would encourage greater participation from researchers, benefiting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Kai Lv , Yuqing Yang , Tengxiao Liu , Qinghui Gao , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. Typically, LLMs are first pre-trained on large corpora and subsequently fine-tuned on task-specific datasets. However, during fine-tuning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yupeng Chen , Senmiao Wang , Yushun Zhang , Zhihang Lin , Haozhe Zhang , Weijian Sun , Tian Ding , Ruoyu Sun

On-device fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving personalization of large language models, but mobile devices impose severe memory constraints, typically 6--12GB shared across all workloads. Existing approaches force a trade-off between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Juneyoung Park , Yuri Hong , Seongwan Kim , Jaeho Lee

Large deep learning models offer significant accuracy gains, but training billions to trillions of parameters is challenging. Existing solutions such as data and model parallelisms exhibit fundamental limitations to fit these models into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-14 Samyam Rajbhandari , Jeff Rasley , Olatunji Ruwase , Yuxiong He

Fine-tuning pre-trained speech foundation models for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is prevalent, yet constrained by substantial GPU memory requirements. We introduce ZO-ASR, a memory-efficient Zeroth-Order (ZO) method that avoids…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yuezhang Peng , Yuxin Liu , Yao Li , Sheng Wang , Fei Wen , Xie Chen

Nowadays, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been trained using extended context lengths to foster more creative applications. However, long context training poses great challenges considering the constraint of GPU memory. It not only leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Pinxue Zhao , Hailin Zhang , Fangcheng Fu , Xiaonan Nie , Qibin Liu , Fang Yang , Yuanbo Peng , Dian Jiao , Shuaipeng Li , Jinbao Xue , Yangyu Tao , Bin Cui

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become increasingly popular and important in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), especially on edge devices due to its ability to adjust the model to local data without the need for memory-intensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jiahe Chen , Ziye Ma

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order methods like back-propagation is computationally intensive. Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimisation uses function evaluations instead of gradients, reducing memory usage, but suffers from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Alessio Galatolo , Zhenbang Dai , Katie Winkle , Meriem Beloucif

Since the release of GPT2-1.5B in 2019, the large language models (LLMs) have evolved from specialized deep models to versatile foundation models. While demonstrating remarkable zero-shot ability, the LLMs still require fine-tuning on local…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Yanjie Dong , Haijun Zhang , Chengming Li , Song Guo , Victor C. M. Leung , Xiping Hu

Federated fine-tuning offers a promising approach for tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices while preserving data privacy. However, fine-tuning these models on edge devices remains challenging due to high memory,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Mohamed Aboelenien Ahmed , Kilian Pfeiffer , Ramin Khalili , Heba Khdr , Jörg Henkel

Fine-tuning large language models is a popular choice among users trying to adapt them for specific applications. However, fine-tuning these models is a demanding task because the user has to examine several factors, such as resource…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Arjun Singh , Nikhil Pandey , Anup Shirgaonkar , Pavan Manoj , Vijay Aski

Finetuning language models (LMs) is crucial for adapting the models to downstream data and tasks. However, full finetuning is usually costly. Existing work, such as parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT), often focuses on \textit{how to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jian Gu , Aldeida Aleti , Chunyang Chen , Hongyu Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) are computationally intensive. The computation workload and the memory footprint grow quadratically with the dimension (layer width). Most of LLMs' parameters come from the linear layers of the transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Xiao-Yang Liu , Jie Zhang , Guoxuan Wang , Weiqing Tong , Anwar Walid

We introduce LOREN, a curvature-aware zeroth-order (ZO) optimization method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). Existing ZO methods, which estimate gradients via finite differences using random perturbations, often suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Hyunseok Seung , Jaewoo Lee , Hyunsuk Ko

Full parameter fine tuning is a key technique for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but it incurs substantial memory overhead due to the need to cache extensive intermediate activations for backpropagation. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Ningyuan Liu , Jing Yang , Kaitong Cai , Keze Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for tackling many language-processing tasks. Despite their success, training and fine-tuning these models is still far too computationally and memory intensive. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Roy Miles , Pradyumna Reddy , Ismail Elezi , Jiankang Deng

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

We study the problem of training neural networks with quantized parameters. Learning low-precision quantized parameters by enabling computation of gradients via the Straight-Through Estimator (STE) can be challenging. While the STE enables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Ningfeng Yang , Tor M. Aamodt