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Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks with verifiable rewards. However, standard token-level PPO struggles in this setting due to the instability of temporal credit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Tianyi Wang , Yixia Li , Long Li , Yibiao Chen , Shaohan Huang , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Michael Muehlebach , Niao He

The last year has witnessed the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) across diverse domains. Among them, CodeLLMs have garnered particular attention because they can not only assist in completing various programming tasks but also…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yibo Miao , Bofei Gao , Shanghaoran Quan , Junyang Lin , Daoguang Zan , Jiaheng Liu , Jian Yang , Tianyu Liu , Zhijie Deng

This work studies the problem of large language model (LLM) unlearning, aiming to remove unwanted data influences (e.g., copyrighted or harmful content) while preserving model utility. Despite the increasing demand for unlearning, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Chongyu Fan , Jiancheng Liu , Licong Lin , Jinghan Jia , Ruiqi Zhang , Song Mei , Sijia Liu

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

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

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) in federated learning (FL) settings has become increasingly important as it allows resource-constrained devices to finetune a model using private data. However, finetuning LLMs using backpropagation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Kunjal Panchal , Nisarg Parikh , Sunav Choudhary , Lijun Zhang , Yuriy Brun , Hui Guan

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is widely used to handle challenging tasks, such as query-based black-box adversarial attacks and reinforcement learning. Various attempts have been made to integrate prior information into the gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-09 Shuyu Cheng , Guoqiang Wu , Jun Zhu

Approximate bi-level optimization (ABLO) consists of (outer-level) optimization problems, involving numerical (inner-level) optimization loops. While ABLO has many applications across deep learning, it suffers from time and memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Valerii Likhosherstov , Xingyou Song , Krzysztof Choromanski , Jared Davis , Adrian Weller

Scientific discovery is increasingly constrained by costly experiments and limited resources, underscoring the need for efficient optimization in AI for science. Bayesian Optimization (BO), though widely adopted for balancing exploration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xinzhe Yuan , Zhuo Chen , Jianshu Zhang , Huan Xiong , Nanyang Ye , Yuqiang Li , Qinying Gu

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate robust capabilities across various fields, leading to a paradigm shift in LLM-enhanced Recommender System (RS). Research to date focuses on point-wise and pair-wise recommendation paradigms, which…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Wen-Shuo Chao , Zhi Zheng , Hengshu Zhu , Hao Liu

Token-level attention tuning, a class of training-free methods including Post-hoc Attention Steering (PASTA) and Attention Calibration (ACT), has emerged as a promising approach for improving frozen LLMs via interpretable interventions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Feijiang Han , Xiaodong Yu , Jianheng Tang , Delip Rao , Weihua Du , Lyle Ungar

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have emphasized the critical role of fine-tuning (FT) techniques in adapting LLMs to specific tasks, especially when retraining from scratch is computationally infeasible. Fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Xiao Han , Zimo Zhao , Wanyu Wang , Maolin Wang , Zitao Liu , Yi Chang , Xiangyu Zhao

Optimization is ubiquitous. While derivative-based algorithms have been powerful tools for various problems, the absence of gradient imposes challenges on many real-world applications. In this work, we propose Optimization by PROmpting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Chengrun Yang , Xuezhi Wang , Yifeng Lu , Hanxiao Liu , Quoc V. Le , Denny Zhou , Xinyun Chen

Training efficiency in large-scale models is typically assessed through memory consumption, training time, and model performance. Current methods often exhibit trade-offs among these metrics, as optimizing one generally degrades at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Tianhao Miao , Zhongyuan Bao , Lejun Zhang

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful approach for optimizing complex and expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. Its importance is underscored in many applications, notably including hyperparameter tuning, but its efficacy depends on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Tennison Liu , Nicolás Astorga , Nabeel Seedat , Mihaela van der Schaar

As the parameters of Large Language Models (LLMs) have scaled to hundreds of billions, the demand for efficient training methods -- balancing faster computation and reduced memory usage without sacrificing accuracy -- has become more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Kaan Ozkara , Tao Yu , Youngsuk Park

The widespread application of large language models (LLMs) raises increasing demands on ensuring safety or imposing constraints, such as reducing harmful content and adhering to predefined rules. While there have been several works studying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yihan Du , Seo Taek Kong , R. Srikant

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

Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization plays an essential role in scenarios where gradient information is inaccessible or unaffordable, such as black-box systems and resource-constrained environments. While existing adaptive methods such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yao Shu , Qixin Zhang , Kun He , Zhongxiang Dai