Related papers: Leveraging Coordinate Momentum in SignSGD and Muon…
In this work, we study optimization methods that leverage the linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a norm-ball. We propose a new stochastic family of algorithms that uses the LMO to adapt to the geometry of the problem and, perhaps…
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…
We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…
As the parameters of Large Language Models (LLMs) have scaled to hundreds of billions, the demand for efficient training methods -- balancing faster computation and reduced memory usage without sacrificing accuracy -- has become more…
Recently, Muon and related spectral optimizers have demonstrated strong empirical performance as scalable stochastic methods, often outperforming Adam. Yet their behaviour remains poorly understood. We analyze stochastic spectral…
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…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) poses significant memory challenges, as the back-propagation process demands extensive resources, especially with growing model sizes. Recent work, MeZO, addresses this issue using a zeroth-order…
We introduce Hindsight-Guided Momentum (HGM), a first-order optimization algorithm that adaptively scales learning rates based on the directional consistency of recent updates. Traditional adaptive methods, such as Adam or RMSprop , adapt…
Sign-based optimization algorithms, such as SignSGD, have garnered significant attention for their remarkable performance in distributed learning and training large foundation models. Despite their empirical superiority, SignSGD is known to…
Large language models have achieved remarkable success, but their extensive parameter size necessitates substantial memory for training, thereby setting a high threshold. While the recently proposed low-memory optimization (LOMO) reduces…
The training efficiency and scalability of language models on massive clusters currently remain a critical bottleneck. Mainstream approaches like ND parallelism are often cumbersome and complex, while flexible alternatives such as the Zero…
Distributed learning is essential for training large-scale deep models. Asynchronous SGD (ASGD) and its variants are commonly used distributed learning methods, particularly in scenarios where the computing capabilities of workers in the…
The memory challenges associated with training Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a critical concern, particularly when using the Adam optimizer. To address this issue, numerous memory-efficient techniques have been proposed, with…
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…
With the increase in the number of parameters in large language models, the process of pre-training and fine-tuning increasingly demands larger volumes of GPU memory. A significant portion of this memory is typically consumed by the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at various natural language processing tasks but remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that induce harmful content generation. In this paper, we reveal a critical safety inconsistency: LLMs can more…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…
A central challenge in continual learning for large language models (LLMs) is catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to new tasks can substantially degrade performance on previously learned ones. Existing projection-based methods mitigate…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is being recognized as a simple yet powerful alternative to standard backpropagation (BP)-based training. Notably, ZO optimization allows for training with only forward passes and (almost) the same memory as…
The Muon optimizer has emerged as a compelling alternative to Adam for training large language models, achieving remarkable computational savings through gradient orthogonalization. However, Muon's optimizer state is more sensitive to…