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Related papers: QuZO: Quantized Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning for Large…

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We study the problem of training neural networks with quantized parameters. Learning low-precision quantized parameters by enabling computation of gradients via the Straight-Through Estimator (STE) can be challenging. While the STE enables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Ningfeng Yang , Tor M. Aamodt

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

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

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

The increasing computational and memory demands in deep learning present significant challenges, especially in resource-constrained environments. We introduce a zero-order quantized optimization (ZOQO) method designed for training models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Noga Bar , Raja Giryes

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

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

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

QLoRA reduces the memory-cost of fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) with LoRA by quantizing the base LLM. However, quantization introduces quantization errors that negatively impact model performance after fine-tuning. In this paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Neal Lawton , Aishwarya Padmakumar , Judith Gaspers , Jack FitzGerald , Anoop Kumar , Greg Ver Steeg , Aram Galstyan

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the natural language processing paradigm but impose substantial demands on memory and computational resources. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to reduce memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Xilong Xie , Liang Wang , Limin Xiao , Meng Han , Lin Sun , Shuai Zheng , Xiangrong Xu

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…

Quantization is an indispensable technique for serving Large Language Models (LLMs) and has recently found its way into LoRA fine-tuning. In this work we focus on the scenario where quantization and LoRA fine-tuning are applied together on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Yixiao Li , Yifan Yu , Chen Liang , Pengcheng He , Nikos Karampatziakis , Weizhu Chen , Tuo Zhao

The confluence of Federated Learning (FL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) is ushering in a new era in privacy-preserving natural language processing. However, the intensive memory requirements for fine-tuning LLMs pose significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhenqing Ling , Daoyuan Chen , Liuyi Yao , Yaliang Li , Ying Shen

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

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable impacts across a wide spectrum of natural language processing tasks. Fine-tuning these pretrained models on downstream datasets provides further significant performance gains; however,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Zhikai Li , Xiaoxuan Liu , Banghua Zhu , Zhen Dong , Qingyi Gu , Kurt Keutzer

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) has been empirically effective on a variety of downstream tasks. Existing approaches to finetuning an LLM either focus on parameter-efficient finetuning, which only updates a small number of trainable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zhengxin Zhang , Dan Zhao , Xupeng Miao , Gabriele Oliaro , Qing Li , Yong Jiang , Zhihao Jia

Large language models (LLMs) are omnipresent, however their practical deployment is challenging due to their ever increasing computational and memory demands. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to make them more compute and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Yelysei Bondarenko , Riccardo Del Chiaro , Markus Nagel

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language processing, showcasing exceptional performance across various tasks. However, the expensive memory and computational requirements present significant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ruihao Gong , Yifu Ding , Zining Wang , Chengtao Lv , Xingyu Zheng , Jinyang Du , Haotong Qin , Jinyang Guo , Michele Magno , Xianglong Liu