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We introduce LOREN, a curvature-aware zeroth-order (ZO) optimization method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). Existing ZO methods, which estimate gradients via finite differences using random perturbations, often suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Hyunseok Seung , Jaewoo Lee , Hyunsuk Ko

While fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks often yields impressive results, it comes at the cost of memory inefficiency due to back-propagation in gradient-based training. Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yong Liu , Zirui Zhu , Chaoyu Gong , Minhao Cheng , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Yang You

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Sihwan Park , Jihun Yun , SungYub Kim , Souvik Kundu , Eunho Yang

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

Zeroth-order or derivative-free optimization (MeZO) is an attractive strategy for finetuning large language models (LLMs) because it eliminates the memory overhead of backpropagation. However, it converges slowly due to the inherent curse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Lejs Deen Behric , Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil

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

Fine-tuning is powerful for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, but it often results in huge memory usages. A promising approach to mitigate this is using Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, which estimates gradients to replace…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Fei Wang , Li Shen , Liang Ding , Chao Xue , Ye Liu , Changxing Ding

Large language models (LLMs) excel across various tasks, but standard first-order (FO) fine-tuning demands considerable memory, significantly limiting real-world deployment. Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization stood out as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Qitao Tan , Jun Liu , Zheng Zhan , Caiwei Ding , Yanzhi Wang , Xiaolong Ma , Jaewoo Lee , Jin Lu , Geng Yuan

Fine-tuning large pre-trained LLMs generally demands extensive GPU memory. Traditional first-order optimizers like SGD encounter substantial difficulties due to increased memory requirements from storing activations and gradients during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Liangyu Wang , Jie Ren , Hang Xu , Junxiao Wang , Huanyi Xie , David E. Keyes , Di Wang

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

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) have brought about significant transformations in human society. Among the crucial computations in LLMs, the softmax unit holds great importance. Its helps the model generating a probability distribution on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Yichuan Deng , Zhihang Li , Sridhar Mahadevan , Zhao Song

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

Lowering the memory requirement in full-parameter training on large models has become a hot research area. MeZO fine-tunes the large language models (LLMs) by just forward passes in a zeroth-order SGD optimizer (ZO-SGD), demonstrating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Shuoran Jiang , Qingcai Chen , Youchen Pan , Yang Xiang , Yukang Lin , Xiangping Wu , Chuanyi Liu , Xiaobao Song

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 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

The memory challenges associated with training Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a critical concern, particularly when using the Adam optimizer. To address this issue, numerous memory-efficient techniques have been proposed, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Yiming Chen , Yuan Zhang , Yin Liu , Kun Yuan , Zaiwen Wen

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