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In this paper, we consider a distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problem, which is about minimizing a sum of $n$ local cost functions over a network with only zeroth-order information. A novel single-loop Decentralized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Hongxu Chen , Jinchi Chen , Ke Wei

With the success that the field of bilevel optimization has seen in recent years, similar methodologies have started being applied to solving more difficult applications that arise in trilevel optimization. At the helm of these applications…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-13 Tommaso Giovannelli , Griffin Dean Kent , Luis Nunes Vicente

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve the performance of multiple related prediction tasks by leveraging useful information from them. Due to their flexibility and ability to reduce unknown coefficients substantially, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Yuzhao Zhang , Yifan Sun

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for a variety of downstream tasks. However, as LLMs grow in size, the memory demands for backpropagation become increasingly prohibitive. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Ziming Yu , Pan Zhou , Sike Wang , Jia Li , Mi Tian , Hua Huang

In the learning to learn (L2L) framework, we cast the design of optimization algorithms as a machine learning problem and use deep neural networks to learn the update rules. In this paper, we extend the L2L framework to zeroth-order (ZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Yangjun Ruan , Yuanhao Xiong , Sashank Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar , Cho-Jui Hsieh

In this paper, we consider a stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem with the cost function being distributed over $n$ agents having access only to zeroth-order (ZO) information of the cost. This problem has various machine…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-11 Xinlei Yi , Shengjun Zhang , Tao Yang , Karl H. Johansson

Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning demands significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zhen Zhang , Yifan Yang , Kai Zhen , Nathan Susanj , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Siegfried Kunzmann , Zheng Zhang

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

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) refers to the problem of learning to classify instances from the novel classes (unseen) that are absent in the training set (seen). Most ZSL methods infer the correlation between visual features and attributes to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Zhe Liu , Yun Li , Lina Yao , Xianzhi Wang , Guodong Long

Given the semantic descriptions of classes, Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes without labeled training data by exploiting semantic information, which contains knowledge between seen and unseen classes. Existing ZSL…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Vivek Chalumuri , Bac Nguyen

Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Matin Ansaripour , Shayan Talaei , Giorgi Nadiradze , Dan Alistarh

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has demonstrated remarkable promise in efficient fine-tuning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs). In particular, recent advances incorporate the low-rankness of gradients, introducing low-rank ZO estimators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Yan Sun , Tiansheng Huang , Liang Ding , Li Shen , Dacheng Tao

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

In this paper, we propose a Distributed Zero-Shot Learning (DistZSL) framework that can fully exploit decentralized data to learn an effective model for unseen classes. Considering the data heterogeneity issues across distributed nodes, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Zhi Chen , Yadan Luo , Zi Huang , Jingjing Li , Sen Wang , Xin Yu

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) 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

Zero-shot in-context learning (ZS-ICL) aims to conduct in-context learning (ICL) without using human-annotated demonstrations. Most ZS-ICL methods use large language models (LLMs) to generate (input, label) pairs as pseudo-demonstrations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Xinyu Tang , Xiaolei Wang , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Deep learning (DL) has achieved great success in many applications, but it has been less well analyzed from the theoretical perspective. The unexplainable success of black-box DL models has raised questions among scientists and promoted the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Huu-Thiet Nguyen , Chien Chern Cheah , Kar-Ann Toh

Distributed zeroth-order optimization is increasingly applied in heterogeneous scenarios where agents possess distinct data distributions and objectives. This heterogeneity poses fundamental challenges for convergence analysis, as existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Haonan Wang , Xinlei Yi , Yiguang Hong , Minghui Liwang

Long-tailed semi-supervised learning (LTSSL) represents a practical scenario for semi-supervised applications, challenged by skewed labeled distributions that bias classifiers. This problem is often aggravated by discrepancies between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Emanuel Sanchez Aimar , Nathaniel Helgesen , Yonghao Xu , Marco Kuhlmann , Michael Felsberg