Related papers: Revisiting Zeroth-Order Optimization for Memory-Ef…

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…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with backpropagation\textemdash even for a subset of parameters such as LoRA\textemdash can be much more memory-consuming than inference and is often deemed impractical for resource-constrained…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are currently pre-trained and fine-tuned on large cloud servers. The next frontier is LLM personalization, where a foundation model can be fine-tuned with user/task-specific data. Given the sensitive nature of…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) poses significant memory challenges, as the back-propagation process demands extensive resources, especially with growing model sizes. Recent work, MeZO, addresses this issue using a zeroth-order…

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…

On-device fine-tuning is a critical capability for edge AI systems, which must support adaptation to different agentic tasks under stringent memory constraints. Conventional backpropagation (BP)-based training requires storing layer…

Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) grow dramatically in size, there is an increasing trend in compressing and speeding up these models. Previous studies have highlighted the usefulness of gradients for importance scoring in neural network…

Large language models (LLMs) are still struggling in aligning with human preference in complex tasks and scenarios. They are prone to overfit into the unexpected patterns or superficial styles in the training data. We conduct an empirical…

Iterative optimization is central to modern artificial intelligence (AI) and provides a crucial framework for understanding adaptive systems. This review provides a unified perspective on this subject, bridging classic theory with neural…

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…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is an emerging deep neural network (DNN) training paradigm that offers computational simplicity and memory savings. However, this seemingly promising approach faces a significant and long-ignored challenge. ZO…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves either full fine-tuning, which updates all model parameters, or Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), which adjusts a small subset of parameters. However, both approaches have…

Full fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is notoriously memory-intensive, primarily because conventional optimizers such as SGD or Adam assume access to exact gradients derived from cached activations. Existing solutions either…

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…

Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising pathway for collaboratively fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) at the edge; however, this paradigm faces a critical bottleneck: the prohibitive communication and memory overheads incurred by…

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.…

Fine-tuning large models on edge devices is severely hindered by the memory-intensive backpropagation (BP) in standard frameworks like federated learning and split learning. While substituting BP with zeroth-order optimization can…

First-order algorithms have been popular for solving convex and non-convex optimization problems. A key assumption for the majority of these algorithms is that the gradient of the objective function is globally Lipschitz continuous, but…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance due to their large parameter counts and extensive training data. However, their scale leads to significant memory bottlenecks during training, especially when using…