Related papers: Converge Faster, Talk Less: Hessian-Informed Feder…

Cross-device federated learning (FL) is a growing machine learning setting whereby multiple edge devices collaborate to train a model without disclosing their raw data. With the great number of mobile devices participating in more FL…

Motivated by the emergence of federated learning (FL), we design and analyze federated methods for addressing: (i) Nondifferentiable nonconvex optimization; (ii) Bilevel optimization; (iii) Minimax problems; and (iv) Two-stage stochastic…

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…

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,…

Federated learning enables collaborative model training across numerous edge devices without requiring participants to share data; however, memory and communication constraints on these edge devices may preclude their participation in…

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) enables clients to collaboratively train personalized models tailored to their individual objectives, addressing the challenge of model generalization in traditional Federated Learning (FL) due to high…

Fine-tuning is powerful for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, but it often results in huge memory usages. A promising approach to mitigate this is using Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, which estimates gradients to replace…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often faces GPU memory bottlenecks: the backward pass of first-order optimizers like Adam increases memory usage to more than 10 times the inference level (e.g., 633 GB for OPT-30B). Zeroth-order…

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…

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…

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…

Language Models (LLMs) are often quantized to lower precision to reduce the memory cost and latency in inference. However, quantization often degrades model performance, thus fine-tuning is required for various down-stream tasks.…

Recent advances in distributed optimization have shown that Newton-type methods with proper communication compression mechanisms can guarantee fast local rates and low communication cost compared to first order methods. We discover that the…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has gained attention as a memory-efficient alternative to first-order (FO) methods, particularly in settings where gradient computation is expensive or even impractical. Beyond its memory efficiency, in this…

Federated learning is a machine learning approach where multiple devices collaboratively learn with the help of a parameter server by sharing only their local updates. While gradient-based optimization techniques are widely adopted in this…

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) attracts increasing attention because it empowers multiple parties to jointly train a privacy-preserving model over vertically partitioned data. Recent research has shown that applying zeroth-order…

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Second-order methods are widely adopted to improve the convergence rate of learning algorithms. In federated learning (FL), these methods require the clients to share their local Hessian matrices with the parameter server (PS), which comes…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order methods like back-propagation is computationally intensive. Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimisation uses function evaluations instead of gradients, reducing memory usage, but suffers from…

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…