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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…
Federated learning (FL) scenarios inherently generate a large communication overhead by frequently transmitting neural network updates between clients and server. To minimize the communication cost, introducing sparsity in conjunction with…
Federated Learning is a machine learning setting where the goal is to train a high-quality centralized model while training data remains distributed over a large number of clients each with unreliable and relatively slow network…
Federated Learning enables collaborative fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) across decentralized Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (Non-IID) clients, but such models' massive parameter sizes lead to significant memory and…
Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…
Recently, federated learning (FL), which replaces data sharing with model sharing, has emerged as an efficient and privacy-friendly machine learning (ML) paradigm. One of the main challenges in FL is the huge communication cost for model…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a subset of gradient-free optimization that emerges in many signal processing and machine learning applications. It is used for solving optimization problems similarly to gradient-based methods. However, it…
In federated learning (FL), models must \emph{converge quickly} under tight communication budgets while \emph{generalizing} across non-IID client distributions. These twin requirements have naturally led to two widely used techniques:…
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…
Information compression is essential to reduce communication cost in distributed optimization over peer-to-peer networks. This paper proposes a communication-efficient linearly convergent distributed (COLD) algorithm to solve strongly…
Popular machine learning approaches forgo second-order information due to the difficulty of computing curvature in high dimensions. We present FOSI, a novel meta-algorithm that improves the performance of any base first-order optimizer by…
Federated Learning (FL) allows multiple distributed devices to jointly train a shared model without centralizing data, but communication cost remains a major bottleneck, especially in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces…
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…
Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has demonstrated success in a wide array of downstream tasks. However, as LMs are scaled up, the memory requirements for backpropagation become prohibitively high. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods can…
In a real federated learning (FL) system, communication overhead for passing model parameters between the clients and the parameter server (PS) is often a bottleneck. Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) that poses multiple edge servers…
We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…
We propose a communication efficient quasi-Newton method for large-scale multi-agent convex composite optimization. We assume the setting of a network of agents that cooperatively solve a global minimization problem with strongly convex…
The minimization of convex functions which are only available through partial and noisy information is a key methodological problem in many disciplines. In this paper we consider convex optimization with noisy zero-th order information,…
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…
Federated Learning (FL) enables decentralized model training across multiple clients while optionally preserving data privacy. However, communication efficiency remains a critical bottleneck, particularly for large-scale models. In this…