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Related papers: Localized Zeroth-Order Prompt Optimization

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In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order (FO) optimizers like SGD and Adam has become standard. Yet, as LLMs grow {in size}, the substantial memory…

Bayesian Optimization (BO) has been widely used to efficiently optimize expensive black-box functions with limited evaluations. In this paper, we investigate the use of BO for prompt engineering to enhance text classification with Large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Adam Ballew , Jingbo Wang , Shaogang Ren

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using standard first-order (FO) optimization often drives training toward sharp, poorly generalizing minima. Conversely, zeroth-order (ZO) methods offer stronger exploratory behavior without relying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Feihu Jin , Ying Tan

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities as cost-effective and reference-free evaluators for assessing language generation quality. In particular, pairwise LLM evaluators, which compare two generated texts and determine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Han Zhou , Xingchen Wan , Yinhong Liu , Nigel Collier , Ivan Vulić , Anna Korhonen

Since the advent of large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering has been a crucial step for eliciting desired responses for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, prompt engineering remains an impediment for end…

Language Models (LLMs) are often quantized to lower precision to reduce the memory cost and latency in inference. However, quantization often degrades model performance, thus fine-tuning is required for various down-stream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Jiajun Zhou , Yifan Yang , Kai Zhen , Ziyue Liu , Yequan Zhao , Ershad Banijamali , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Ngai Wong , Zheng Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success across diverse tasks, and fine-tuning is sometimes needed to further enhance generation quality. Most existing methods rely on human supervision or parameter retraining, both of which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zhen-Yu Zhang , Jiandong Zhang , Huaxiu Yao , Gang Niu , Masashi Sugiyama

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success, and their multimodal expansions (MLLMs) further unlock capabilities spanning images, videos, and other modalities beyond text. However, despite this shift, prompt optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Yumin Choi , Dongki Kim , Jinheon Baek , Sung Ju Hwang

Fine-tuning large pretrained language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of modern NLP, yet its growing memory demands (driven by backpropagation and large optimizer States) limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Zero-order (ZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Valery Parfenov , Grigoriy Evseev , Andrey Veprikov , Nikolay Bushkov , Stanislav Moiseev , Aleksandr Beznosikov

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Zhendong Mi , Qitao Tan , Grace Li Zhang , Zhaozhuo Xu , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance as general purpose agents, but their abilities remain highly dependent on prompts which are hand written with onerous trial-and-error effort. We propose a simple and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Reid Pryzant , Dan Iter , Jerry Li , Yin Tat Lee , Chenguang Zhu , Michael Zeng

Recent studies have introduced various approaches for prompt-tuning black-box vision-language models, referred to as black-box prompt-tuning (BBPT). While BBPT has demonstrated considerable potential, it is often found that many existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Seonghwan Park , Jaehyeon Jeong , Yongjun Kim , Jaeho Lee , Namhoon Lee

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive success in various applications. However, these models are often not well aligned with human intents, which calls for additional treatments on them; that is, the alignment problem. To make…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Jiale Cheng , Xiao Liu , Kehan Zheng , Pei Ke , Hongning Wang , Yuxiao Dong , Jie Tang , Minlie Huang

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is a memory-efficient strategy for fine-tuning Large Language Models using only forward passes. However, the application of ZO fine-tuning in memory-constrained settings such as mobile phones and laptops is…

Large language model (LLM)-based Multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown promise in tackling complex collaborative tasks, where agents are typically orchestrated via role-specific prompts. While the quality of these prompts is pivotal, jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zhexuan Wang , Xuebo Liu , Li Wang , Zifei Shan , Yutong Wang , Zhenxi Song , Min Zhang

An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model outputs. While recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 MohammadReza Davari , Utkarsh Garg , Weixin Cai , Eugene Belilovsky

Prompt learning has become a key method for adapting large language models to specific tasks with limited data. However, traditional gradient-based optimization methods for tuning prompts are computationally intensive, posing challenges for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Yao Fu , Yihang Jin , Chunxia Zhang , Junmin Liu , Guang Dai , Haishan Ye

The remarkable advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought about significant improvements in Natural Language Processing(NLP) tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive review of in-context learning techniques, focusing on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Yinheng Li

Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning black-box large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have likewise been shown to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Saaduddin Mahmud , Mason Nakamura , Kyle Hollins Wray , Shlomo Zilberstein

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces memory costs when adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream applications. However, traditional first-order (FO) fine-tuning algorithms incur substantial memory overhead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Yiming Chen , Yuan Zhang , Liyuan Cao , Kun Yuan , Zaiwen Wen