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Large language models (LLMs) excel across various tasks, but standard first-order (FO) fine-tuning demands considerable memory, significantly limiting real-world deployment. Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization stood out as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Qitao Tan , Jun Liu , Zheng Zhan , Caiwei Ding , Yanzhi Wang , Xiaolong Ma , Jaewoo Lee , Jin Lu , Geng Yuan

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

Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant and transformative changes in human society. These models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, leading to various advancements and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Yeqi Gao , Zhao Song , Shenghao Xie

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a gradient-free alternative to first-order (FO) methods by estimating gradients via finite differences of function evaluations, and has recently emerged as a memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yicheng Lang , Changsheng Wang , Yihua Zhang , Mingyi Hong , Zheng Zhang , Wotao Yin , Sijia Liu

Retrained large language models (LLMs) have become extensively used across various sub-disciplines of natural language processing (NLP). In NLP, text classification problems have garnered considerable focus, but still faced with some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Zhiqiang Wang , Yiran Pang , Yanbin Lin

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with backpropagation achieves high performance but incurs substantial memory overhead, limiting scalability on resource-constrained hardware. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Shuo Wang , Ziyu Chen , Ming Tang

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has demonstrated success in a wide array of downstream tasks. However, as LMs are scaled up, the memory requirements for backpropagation become prohibitively high. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Tanmay Gautam , Youngsuk Park , Hao Zhou , Parameswaran Raman , Wooseok Ha

We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Arya Akhavan , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

Zeroth-order (ZO) fine-tuning is attractive for large language models because it replaces backpropagation with forward objective evaluations. Existing implementations nevertheless execute ZO algorithms inside conventional training loops,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zelin Li , Caiwen Ding

Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Matin Ansaripour , Shayan Talaei , Giorgi Nadiradze , Dan Alistarh

First-order methods for minimization and saddle point (min-max) problems are widely used for solving large-scale problems, in particular arising in machine learning. The majority of works obtain favorable complexity guarantees of such…

Object manipulation for rearrangement into a specific goal state is a significant task for collaborative robots. Accurately determining object placement is a key challenge, as misalignment can increase task complexity and the risk of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Guanqun Cao , Ryan Mckenna , Erich Graf , John Oyekan

We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Xinran Zheng , Tara Javidi , Behrouz Touri

Calibrating verbalized probabilities presents a novel approach for reliably assessing and leveraging outputs from black-box Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent methods have demonstrated improved calibration by applying techniques like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Cheng Wang , Gyuri Szarvas , Georges Balazs , Pavel Danchenko , Patrick Ernst

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Samet Oymak , Ankit Singh Rawat , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Christos Thrampoulidis

Recent works show we can linearize large language models (LLMs) -- swapping the quadratic attentions of popular Transformer-based LLMs with subquadratic analogs, such as linear attention -- avoiding the expensive pretraining costs. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Michael Zhang , Simran Arora , Rahul Chalamala , Alan Wu , Benjamin Spector , Aaryan Singhal , Krithik Ramesh , Christopher Ré

Fine-tuning vision language models (VLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various downstream tasks; yet, it requires access to model gradients through backpropagation (BP), making them unsuitable for memory-constrained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yifan Yang , Zhen Zhang , Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan , Jing Liu , Nathan Susanj , Zheng Zhang

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress, with model optimization primarily relying on gradient-based optimizers such as Adam. However, these gradient-based methods impose stringent hardware requirements,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 WenTao Liu , Siyu Song , Hao Hao , Aimin Zhou

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in modeling real-world knowledge and enhancing knowledge-based generation tasks. In this paper, we further explore the potential of using LLMs to aid in the design…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Weicheng Ma , Luyang Zhao , Chun-Yi She , Yitao Jiang , Alan Sun , Bo Zhu , Devin Balkcom , Soroush Vosoughi

This paper provides a review and commentary on the past, present, and future of numerical optimization algorithms in the context of machine learning applications. Through case studies on text classification and the training of deep neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-12 Léon Bottou , Frank E. Curtis , Jorge Nocedal