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Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using standard first-order (FO) optimization often drives training toward sharp, poorly generalizing minima. Conversely, zeroth-order (ZO) methods offer stronger exploratory behavior without relying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Feihu Jin , Ying Tan

Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-22 Chinmay Maheshwari , Chih-Yuan Chiu , Eric Mazumdar , S. Shankar Sastry , Lillian J. Ratliff

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

In this study, we consider an optimization problem with uncertainty dependent on decision variables, which has recently attracted attention due to its importance in machine learning and pricing applications. In this problem, the gradient of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-31 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

Large language models (LLMs) have numerous real-life applications across various domains, such as natural language translation, sentiment analysis, language modeling, chatbots and conversational agents, creative writing, text…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yeqi Gao , Zhao Song , Junze Yin

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 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…

This paper focuses on extending the success of large language models (LLMs) to sequential decision making. Existing efforts either (i) re-train or finetune LLMs for decision making, or (ii) design prompts for pretrained LLMs. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Dingyang Chen , Qi Zhang , Yinglun Zhu

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

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks, yet it demands more and more memory as model sizes keep growing. To address this issue, the recently proposed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Yifan Yang , Kai Zhen , Ershad Banijamal , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Zheng Zhang

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Ruiyang Jin , Yuke Zhou , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Siyang Gao

Large language model (LLM) unlearning aims to surgically remove the influence of undesired data or knowledge from an existing model while preserving its utility on unrelated tasks. This paradigm has shown promise in addressing privacy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yicheng Lang , Yihua Zhang , Chongyu Fan , Changsheng Wang , Jinghan Jia , Sijia Liu

Large language models (LLMs) have made fundamental contributions over the last a few years. To train an LLM, one needs to alternatingly run `forward' computations and `backward' computations. The forward computation can be viewed as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Josh Alman , Zhao Song

We investigate the effectiveness of adaptive zeroth-order (ZO) optimization for memory-constrained fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Contrary to prior claims, we show that adaptive ZO methods such as ZO-Adam offer no convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Hassan Dbouk , Nidham Gazagnadou , Matthias Reisser , Christos Louizos

Preference alignment methods are increasingly critical for steering large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs consistent with human values. While recent approaches often rely on synthetic data generated by LLMs for scalability and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Zheren Fu , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

Neural language models have been widely used in various NLP tasks, including machine translation, next word prediction and conversational agents. However, it is challenging to deploy these models on mobile devices due to their slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Patrick H. Chen , Si Si , Sanjiv Kumar , Yang Li , Cho-Jui Hsieh

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

The efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and generating natural language has aroused a wide interest in developing prompt-based methods to harness the power of black-box LLMs. Existing methodologies usually prioritize a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Wenyang Hu , Yao Shu , Zongmin Yu , Zhaoxuan Wu , Xiangqiang Lin , Zhongxiang Dai , See-Kiong Ng , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low