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

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,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in real-world applications. However, adapting LLMs to novel tasks via fine-tuning often requires substantial training data and computational resources that are…

Pre-trained vision models (PVMs) have demonstrated remarkable adaptability across a wide range of downstream vision tasks, showcasing exceptional performance. However, as these models scale to billions or even trillions of parameters,…

We study robust parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques designed to improve accuracy and generalization while operating within strict computational and memory hardware constraints, specifically focusing on large-language models…

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…

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a widely adopted strategy for adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, significantly reducing memory and computational costs. However, most…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has long been favored for its biological plausibility and its capacity to handle non-differentiable objectives, yet its computational complexity has historically limited its application in deep neural…

With the advent of large pre-trained transformer models, fine-tuning these models for various downstream tasks is a critical problem. Paucity of training data, the existence of data silos, and stringent privacy constraints exacerbate this…

Fine-tuning large pre-trained LLMs generally demands extensive GPU memory. Traditional first-order optimizers like SGD encounter substantial difficulties due to increased memory requirements from storing activations and gradients during…

Effective training of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on resource-constrained client devices in Federated Learning (FL) requires the usage of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies. To this end, we demonstrate the impact of…

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…

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…

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is a popular class of techniques that strive to adapt large models in a scalable and resource-efficient manner. Yet, the mechanisms underlying their training performance and generalization remain…

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…

Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with fine-grained spatial reasoning, particularly when multi-step logic and precise spatial alignment are required. In this work, we introduce SpatialReasoner-R1, a vision-language reasoning…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in vision language models (VLMs) is crucial for improving interpretability and trustworthiness. However, current training recipes lack robust CoT reasoning data, relying on datasets dominated by short…

Zeroth-Order optimization presents a promising memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models by relying solely on forward passes. However, its practical adoption is severely constrained by slow wall-clock convergence and…

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…

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a variety of computer vision tasks. However, the multimodal reasoning capability has not been fully explored in existing models. In this paper, we propose a…

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…