English
Related papers

Related papers: Sparse MeZO: Less Parameters for Better Performanc…

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Prabodh Katti , Houssem Sifaou , Sangwoo Park , Bipin Rajendran , Osvaldo Simeone

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Lei Gao , Amir Ziashahabi , Yue Niu , Salman Avestimehr , Murali Annavaram

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

Interest in stochastic zeroth-order (SZO) methods has recently been revived in black-box optimization scenarios such as adversarial black-box attacks to deep neural networks. SZO methods only require the ability to evaluate the objective…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Mayumi Ohta , Nathaniel Berger , Artem Sokolov , Stefan Riezler

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yehonathan Refael , Iftach Arbel , Ofir Lindenbaum , Tom Tirer

The widespread practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data faces two major challenges in memory and privacy. First, as the size of LLMs continues to grow, the memory demands of gradient-based training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Niao He

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open…

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks using First-Order (FO) optimizers presents significant computational challenges. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods address these by freezing most model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Reza Shirkavand , Peiran Yu , Qi He , Heng Huang

On-device fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving personalization of large language models, but mobile devices impose severe memory constraints, typically 6--12GB shared across all workloads. Existing approaches force a trade-off between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Juneyoung Park , Yuri Hong , Seongwan Kim , Jaeho Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Qitao Tan , Sung-En Chang , Rui Xia , Huidong Ji , Chence Yang , Ci Zhang , Jun Liu , Zheng Zhan , Zhenman Fang , Zhou Zou , Yanzhi Wang , Jin Lu , Geng Yuan

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks has become increasingly crucial due to their widespread use and the growing availability of open-source models. However, the high memory costs associated with fine-tuning remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 David H. Yang , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri , Tejaswini Pedapati , Subhajit Chaudhury , Pin-Yu Chen

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

Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) facilitates the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) under limited resources. However, the fine-tuning performance with PEFT on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks is limited due to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Jitai Hao , WeiWei Sun , Xin Xin , Qi Meng , Zhumin Chen , Pengjie Ren , Zhaochun Ren

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a subset of gradient-free optimization that emerges in many signal processing and machine learning applications. It is used for solving optimization problems similarly to gradient-based methods. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Bhavya Kailkhura , Gaoyuan Zhang , Alfred Hero , Pramod K. Varshney

Large language model (LLM) training and finetuning are often bottlenecked by limited GPU memory. While existing projection-based optimization methods address this by projecting gradients into a lower-dimensional subspace to reduce optimizer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Aashiq Muhamed , Oscar Li , David Woodruff , Mona Diab , Virginia Smith

Sparse fine-tuning techniques adapt LLMs to downstream tasks by only tuning a sparse subset of model parameters. However, the effectiveness of sparse adaptation depends on optimally selecting the model parameters to be fine-tuned. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Anand Choudhary , Yasser Sulaıman , Lukas Mauch , Ghouthi Boukli Hacene , Fabien Cardinaux , Antoine Bosselut

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has gained attention as a memory-efficient alternative to first-order (FO) methods, particularly in settings where gradient computation is expensive or even impractical. Beyond its memory efficiency, in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Wanhao Yu , Zheng Wang , Shuteng Niu , Sen Lin , Li Yang

Federated learning enables collaborative model training across numerous edge devices without requiring participants to share data; however, memory and communication constraints on these edge devices may preclude their participation in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Gwen Legate , Irina Rish , Eugene Belilovsky