Related papers: Revisiting Zeroth-Order Optimization for Memory-Ef…
Safety alignment for large language models (LLMs) aims to reduce harmful or unsafe behavior while preserving general utility. However, recent findings reveal that alignment effects can be fragile: lightweight post-alignment manipulations,…
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…
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…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is often limited by the memory available on commodity GPUs. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods such as QLoRA reduce the number of trainable parameters, yet still incur high memory usage…
Owing to the huge success of generative artificial intelligence (AI), large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a core subclass, underpinning applications such as question answering, text generation, and code completion. While…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In…
To solve unmodeled optimization problems with hard constraints, this paper proposes a novel zeroth-order approach called Safe Zeroth-order Optimization using Linear Programs (SZO-LP). The SZO-LP method solves a linear program in each…
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…
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,…
Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, central to decision-making scenarios like logistics and manufacturing, are traditionally solved using problem-specific algorithms requiring significant domain expertise. While large language models…
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). LLMs require an extreme amount of parameters to attain high performance. As models grow into the trillion-parameter range,…
The training efficiency and scalability of language models on massive clusters currently remain a critical bottleneck. Mainstream approaches like ND parallelism are often cumbersome and complex, while flexible alternatives such as the Zero…
We study robust parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques designed to improve accuracy and generalization while operating within strict computational and memory hardware constraints, specifically focusing on large-language models…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, learning from finite differences of function evaluations without backpropagation, has recently regained attention in deep learning due to its memory efficiency and applicability to gray- or black-box…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various tasks, but the escalating demands on computational resources pose significant challenges, particularly in the extensive utilization of full fine-tuning for…
Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…
Training large language models requires optimization algorithms that are not only statistically effective, but also computationally and memory efficient at extreme scale. Although Adam remains the dominant optimizer for large-scale…
The increasing computational and memory demands in deep learning present significant challenges, especially in resource-constrained environments. We introduce a zero-order quantized optimization (ZOQO) method designed for training models…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables memory-efficient training of neural networks by estimating gradients via forward passes only, eliminating the need for backpropagation. However, the stochastic nature of gradient estimation…