Related papers: Perturbation-efficient Zeroth-order Optimization f…

We study robust parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques designed to improve accuracy and generalization while operating within strict computational and memory hardware constraints, specifically focusing on large-language models…

Zeroth-order methods have become important tools for solving problems where we have access only to function evaluations. However, the zeroth-order methods only using gradient approximations are $n$ times slower than classical first-order…

Two types of zeroth-order stochastic algorithms have recently been designed for nonconvex optimization respectively based on the first-order techniques SVRG and SARAH/SPIDER. This paper addresses several important issues that are still open…

Topology Optimization (TO) provides a systematic approach for obtaining structure design with optimum performance of interest. However, the process requires numerical evaluation of objective function and constraints at each iteration, which…

With increasing data and model complexities, the time required to train neural networks has become prohibitively large. To address the exponential rise in training time, users are turning to data parallel neural networks (DPNN) to utilize…

Hardware accelerations of deep learning systems have been extensively investigated in industry and academia. The aim of this paper is to achieve ultra-high energy efficiency and performance for hardware implementations of deep neural…

Federated optimization, an emerging paradigm which finds wide real-world applications such as federated learning, enables multiple clients (e.g., edge devices) to collaboratively optimize a global function. The clients do not share their…

Currently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved a great success in various applications. Traditional deployment for DNNs in the cloud may incur a prohibitively serious delay in transferring input data from the end devices to the cloud.…

In this work we address the problem of convex optimization in a multi-agent setting where the objective is to minimize the mean of local cost functions whose derivatives are not available (e.g. black-box models). Moreover agents can only…

This paper considers reinforcement learning from human feedback in a federated learning setting with resource-constrained agents, such as edge devices. We propose an efficient federated RLHF algorithm, named Partitioned, Sign-based…

Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) has been used to train a wide range of large language models on massive GPUs clusters due to its ease of use, efficiency, and good scalability. However, when training on low-bandwidth clusters, or at scale…

In the wake of the explosive growth in smartphones and cyberphysical systems, there has been an accelerating shift in how data is generated away from centralised data towards on-device generated data. In response, machine learning…

This paper investigates zeroth-order (ZO) finite-sum composite optimization. Recently, variance reduction techniques have been applied to ZO methods to mitigate the non-vanishing variance of 2-point estimators in constrained/composite…

Zeroth-order optimization methods are developed to overcome the practical hurdle of having knowledge of explicit derivatives. Instead, these schemes work with merely access to noisy functions evaluations. One of the predominant approaches…

As distributed optimization scales to meet the demands of Large Language Model (LLM) training, hardware failures become increasingly non-negligible. Existing fault-tolerant training methods often introduce significant computational or…

Despite the great achievements of the modern deep neural networks (DNNs), the vulnerability/robustness of state-of-the-art DNNs raises security concerns in many application domains requiring high reliability. Various adversarial attacks are…

Fine-tuning LLMs is necessary for various dedicated downstream tasks, but classic backpropagation-based fine-tuning methods require substantial GPU memory. To this end, a recent work, MeZO, which relies solely on forward passes to fine-tune…

Continual learning requires new-task adaptation without damaging previously acquired capabilities. Recent forward-pass and zeroth-order (ZO) results show that low-query adaptation may retain better than first-order (FO) descent, but the…

While it is generally understood that zeroth-order (ZO) algorithms have an extra dependency on their number of iterations for any choice of parameters, compared to their first-order (FO) counterparts, in this work, we show that under…

We introduce the Z-Domain Neural Operator (ZNO), a causal neural operator whose layers are stable low-rank multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) rational filters parameterized directly in the $z$-plane. ZNO addresses a limitation of…