English
Related papers

Related papers: Branch, or Layer? Zeroth-Order Optimization for Co…

200 papers

We revisit continual learning~(CL), which enables pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs) to sequentially fine-tune on new downstream tasks over time. However, as the scale of these models increases, catastrophic forgetting remains a more…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Huancheng Chen , Jingtao Li , Weiming Zhuang , Chen Chen , Lingjuan Lyu

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is a memory-efficient strategy for fine-tuning Large Language Models using only forward passes. However, the application of ZO fine-tuning in memory-constrained settings such as mobile phones and laptops is…

Classical optimization theory establishes that zeroth-order (ZO) algorithms suffer from a dimension-dependent slowdown, with convergence rates typically scaling with the model dimension compared to first-order methods. However, in contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Zhe Li , Bicheng Ying , Zidong Liu , Haibo Yang

Mainstream parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA or Adapter, project a model's hidden states to a lower dimension, allowing pre-trained models to adapt to new data through this low-rank bottleneck. However, PEFT tasks…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Tingyu Qu , Tinne Tuytelaars , Marie-Francine Moens

Fine-tuning large pretrained language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of modern NLP, yet its growing memory demands (driven by backpropagation and large optimizer States) limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Zero-order (ZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Valery Parfenov , Grigoriy Evseev , Andrey Veprikov , Nikolay Bushkov , Stanislav Moiseev , Aleksandr Beznosikov

Explorations in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) from Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), have made impressive progress. However, most approaches rely on explicit weight updates, overlooking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Mingyuan Zhang , Yue Bai , Yifan Wang , Yiyang Huang , Yun Fu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Alessio Galatolo , Zhenbang Dai , Katie Winkle , Meriem Beloucif

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs under strict memory constraints, as it avoids the prohibitive memory cost of storing activations for backpropagation. However, existing ZO methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Wei Lin , Yining Jiang , Qingyu Song , Qiao Xiang , Hong Xu

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves either full fine-tuning, which updates all model parameters, or Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), which adjusts a small subset of parameters. However, both approaches have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Shaocong Ma , Peiran Yu , Heng Huang

Large models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence, powering applications in natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal learning. However, fully…

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

We propose an efficient layer-specific optimization (ELO) method designed to enhance continual pretraining (CP) for specific languages in multilingual large language models (MLLMs). This approach addresses the common challenges of high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 HanGyeol Yoo , ChangSu Choi , Minjun Kim , Seohyun Song , SeungWoo Song , Inho Won , Jongyoul Park , Cheoneum Park , KyungTae Lim

Zeroth-order (ZO) fine-tuning is attractive for large language models because it replaces backpropagation with forward objective evaluations. Existing implementations nevertheless execute ZO algorithms inside conventional training loops,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zelin Li , Caiwen Ding

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, learning from finite differences of function evaluations without backpropagation, has recently regained attention in deep learning due to its memory efficiency and applicability to gray- or black-box…

The entry of large language models (LLMs) into research and commercial spaces has led to a trend of ever-larger models, with initial promises of generalisability, followed by a widespread desire to downsize and create specialised models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Niall Taylor , Upamanyu Ghose , Omid Rohanian , Mohammadmahdi Nouriborji , Andrey Kormilitzin , David Clifton , Alejo Nevado-Holgado

With the advent and recent ubiquity of foundation models, continual learning (CL) has recently shifted from continual training from scratch to the continual adaptation of pretrained models, seeing particular success on rehearsal-free CL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Lukas Thede , Karsten Roth , Olivier J. Hénaff , Matthias Bethge , Zeynep Akata

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Bhavya Kailkhura , Gaoyuan Zhang , Alfred Hero , Pramod K. Varshney

The emergence of large pre-trained networks has revolutionized the AI field, unlocking new possibilities and achieving unprecedented performance. However, these models inherit a fundamental limitation from traditional Machine Learning…

Vertical federated learning (VFL) attracts increasing attention due to the emerging demands of multi-party collaborative modeling and concerns of privacy leakage. A complete list of metrics to evaluate VFL algorithms should include model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Qingsong Zhang , Bin Gu , Zhiyuan Dang , Cheng Deng , Heng Huang