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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

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

Optimizing large-scale nonconvex problems, common in deep learning, demands balancing rapid convergence with computational efficiency. First-order (FO) optimizers, which serve as today's baselines, provide fast convergence and good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jiahe Chen , Ziye Ma

The dual challenges of prohibitive communication overhead and the impracticality of gradient computation due to data privacy or black-box constraints in distributed systems motivate this work on communication-constrained gradient-free…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-19 Youqing Hua , Shuai Liu , Yiguang Hong , Wei Ren

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…

Federated fine-tuning offers a promising approach for tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices while preserving data privacy. However, fine-tuning these models on edge devices remains challenging due to high memory,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Mohamed Aboelenien Ahmed , Kilian Pfeiffer , Ramin Khalili , Heba Khdr , Jörg Henkel

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

As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Sijia Liu , Bhavya Kailkhura , Pin-Yu Chen , Paishun Ting , Shiyu Chang , Lisa Amini

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

$\ell_0$ constrained optimization is prevalent in machine learning, particularly for high-dimensional problems, because it is a fundamental approach to achieve sparse learning. Hard-thresholding gradient descent is a dominant technique to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 William de Vazelhes , Hualin Zhang , Huimin Wu , Xiao-Tong Yuan , Bin Gu

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables memory-efficient training of neural networks by estimating gradients via forward passes only, eliminating the need for backpropagation. However, the stochastic nature of gradient estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Chen Zhang , Yuxin Cheng , Chenchen Ding , Shuqi Wang , Jingreng Lei , Runsheng Yu , Yik-Chung WU , Ngai Wong

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

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

Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Wanli Shi , Hongchang Gao , Bin Gu

Stochastic zeroth-order (SZO), or gradient-free, optimization allows to optimize arbitrary functions by relying only on function evaluations under parameter perturbations, however, the iteration complexity of SZO methods suffers a factor…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Artem Sokolov , Julian Hitschler , Mayumi Ohta , Stefan Riezler

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is widely used for solving black-box optimization and control problems. In particular, single-point ZO (SZO) is well-suited to online or dynamic problem settings due to its requirement of only a single…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Xin Chen , Zhaolin Ren

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-20 HanQin Cai , Daniel Mckenzie , Wotao Yin , Zhenliang Zhang

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

Classical optimization theory establishes that zeroth-order (ZO) algorithms suffer from a dimension-dependent slowdown, with convergence rates typically scaling with the model dimension compared to first-order methods. However, in contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Zhe Li , Bicheng Ying , Zidong Liu , Haibo Yang

Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) provides a promising avenue for automating the complex design of deep learning (DL) models. However, current differentiable NAS methods often face constraints in efficiency, operation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Lunchen Xie , Eugenio Lomurno , Matteo Gambella , Danilo Ardagna , Manual Roveri , Matteo Matteucci , Qingjiang Shi