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Related papers: Fine-tuning Quantized Neural Networks with Zeroth-…

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Training neural networks requires significant computational resources and energy. Methods like mixed-precision and quantization-aware training reduce bit usage, yet they still depend heavily on computationally expensive gradient-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Noa Cohen , Omkar Joglekar , Dotan Di Castro , Vladimir Tchuiev , Shir Kozlovsky , Michal Moshkovitz

Quantization is a key method for reducing the GPU memory requirement of training large language models (LLMs). Yet, current approaches are ineffective for 4-bit activations and 8-bit gradients, which would easily cause slow convergence or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Wenxiang Lin , Juntao Huang , Luhan Zhang , Laili Li , Xiang Bao , Mengyang Zhang , Bing Wang , Shaohuai Shi

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

Quantization has significantly improved the compute and memory efficiency of Large Language Model (LLM) training. However, existing approaches still rely on accumulating their updates in high-precision: concretely, gradient updates must be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Mahdi Nikdan , Amir Zandieh , Dan Alistarh , Vahab Mirrokni

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with zeroth-order (ZO) optimization reduces memory by approximating gradients through function evaluations. However, existing methods essentially perform updates in a one-dimensional space, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Jian Feng , Zhihong Huang

We propose a memory-efficient finetuning algorithm for large language models (LLMs) that supports finetuning LLMs with 65B parameters in 2/3/4-bit precision on as little as one 24GB GPU. Our method, modular low-rank adaptation (ModuLoRA),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Junjie Yin , Jiahao Dong , Yingheng Wang , Christopher De Sa , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a gradient-free alternative to first-order (FO) methods by estimating gradients via finite differences of function evaluations, and has recently emerged as a memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yicheng Lang , Changsheng Wang , Yihua Zhang , Mingyi Hong , Zheng Zhang , Wotao Yin , Sijia Liu

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

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 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 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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) but demand massive GPU resources for training. Lowering the threshold for LLMs training would encourage greater participation from researchers, benefiting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Kai Lv , Yuqing Yang , Tengxiao Liu , Qinghui Gao , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu

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

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Zhendong Mi , Qitao Tan , Grace Li Zhang , Zhaozhuo Xu , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

Large language models have achieved significant advancements in complex mathematical reasoning benchmarks, such as MATH. However, their substantial computational requirements present challenges for practical deployment. Model quantization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Zhen Li , Yupeng Su , Runming Yang , Congkai Xie , Zheng Wang , Zhongwei Xie , Ngai Wong , Hongxia Yang

Large language models (LLMs) require immense resources for training and inference. Quantization, a technique that reduces the precision of model parameters, offers a promising solution for improving LLM efficiency and sustainability. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Jacob Nielsen , Peter Schneider-Kamp , Lukas Galke

Despite advances using low-rank adapters and quantization, pretraining of large models on consumer hardware has not been possible without model sharding, offloading during training, or per-layer gradient updates. To address these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Sebastian Loeschcke , Mads Toftrup , Michael J. Kastoryano , Serge Belongie , Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson

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