English
Related papers

Related papers: Enhancing Zeroth-order Fine-tuning for Language Mo…

200 papers

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…

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs under strict memory constraints, as it avoids the prohibitive memory cost of storing activations for backpropagation. However, existing ZO methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Wei Lin , Yining Jiang , Qingyu Song , Qiao Xiang , Hong Xu

We investigate the effectiveness of adaptive zeroth-order (ZO) optimization for memory-constrained fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Contrary to prior claims, we show that adaptive ZO methods such as ZO-Adam offer no convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Hassan Dbouk , Nidham Gazagnadou , Matthias Reisser , Christos Louizos

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has demonstrated success in a wide array of downstream tasks. However, as LMs are scaled up, the memory requirements for backpropagation become prohibitively high. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Tanmay Gautam , Youngsuk Park , Hao Zhou , Parameswaran Raman , Wooseok Ha

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as an critical technique for adapting large-scale foundation models across natural language processing and computer vision. While existing methods such as low-rank adaptations achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 An Nguyen , Jaesik Choi , Anh Tong

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with zeroth-order (ZO) optimization reduces memory by approximating gradients through function evaluations. However, existing methods essentially perform updates in a one-dimensional space, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Jian Feng , Zhihong Huang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order optimization (ZO) offers a memory-efficient alternative to gradient-based methods but suffers from slower convergence and unstable optimization due to noisy gradient estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Jikai Long , Zijian Hu , Xiaodong Yu , Jianwen Xie , Zhaozhuo Xu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with backpropagation achieves high performance but incurs substantial memory overhead, limiting scalability on resource-constrained hardware. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Shuo Wang , Ziyu Chen , Ming Tang

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

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Yet traditional first-order optimizers such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adam incur prohibitive memory and computational…

Vision-Language Continual Learning (VLCL) has attracted significant research attention for its robust capabilities, and the adoption of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies is enabling these models to achieve competitive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Ziwei Liu , Borui Kang , Wei Li , Hangjie Yuan , Yanbing Yang , Wenbin Li , Yifan Zhu , Tao Feng , Jun Luo

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often faces GPU memory bottlenecks: the backward pass of first-order optimizers like Adam increases memory usage to more than 10 times the inference level (e.g., 633 GB for OPT-30B). Zeroth-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Sizhe Dang , Yangyang Guo , Yanjun Zhao , Haishan Ye , Xiaodong Zheng , Guang Dai , Ivor Tsang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks, yet it demands more and more memory as model sizes keep growing. To address this issue, the recently proposed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Yifan Yang , Kai Zhen , Ershad Banijamal , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Zheng Zhang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with classic first-order optimizers entails prohibitive GPU memory due to the backpropagation process. Recent works have turned to zeroth-order optimizers for fine-tuning, which save substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yanjun Zhao , Sizhe Dang , Haishan Ye , Guang Dai , Yi Qian , Ivor W. Tsang

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

As the size of large language models grows exponentially, GPU memory has become a bottleneck for adapting these models to downstream tasks. In this paper, we aim to push the limits of memory-efficient training by minimizing memory usage on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Sifeng Shang , Jiayi Zhou , Chenyu Lin , Minxian Li , Kaiyang Zhou

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

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) aims to adapt pre-trained models to specific tasks using relatively small and domain-specific datasets. Among Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yarui Cao , Kai Liu