Related papers: The Cost of Avoiding Backpropagation
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…
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…
Using backpropagation to compute gradients of objective functions for optimization has remained a mainstay of machine learning. Backpropagation, or reverse-mode differentiation, is a special case within the general family of automatic…
Direct training of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic hardware can greatly reduce energy costs compared to GPU-based training. However, implementing Backpropagation (BP) on such hardware is challenging because forward and…
The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm was recently proposed as a local learning method to address the limitations of backpropagation (BP), offering biological plausibility along with memory-efficient and highly parallelized computational…
On-device fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving personalization of large language models, but mobile devices impose severe memory constraints, typically 6--12GB shared across all workloads. Existing approaches force a trade-off between…
Fine-tuning pretrained large models to downstream tasks is an important problem, which however suffers from huge memory overhead due to large-scale parameters. This work strives to reduce memory overhead in fine-tuning from perspectives of…
Traditional optimization methods rely on the use of single-precision floating point arithmetic, which can be costly in terms of memory size and computing power. However, mixed precision optimization techniques leverage the use of both…
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces memory costs when adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream applications. However, traditional first-order (FO) fine-tuning algorithms incur substantial memory overhead…
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…
Backward propagation (BP) is widely used to compute the gradients in neural network training. However, it is hard to implement BP on edge devices due to the lack of hardware and software resources to support automatic differentiation. This…
Back propagation (BP) is the default solution for gradient computation in neural network training. However, implementing BP-based training on various edge devices such as FPGA, microcontrollers (MCUs), and analog computing platforms face…
Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization is pivotal for scenarios where backpropagation is unavailable, such as memory-constrained on-device learning and black-box optimization. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: they are either…
The performance of deep neural networks is well-known to be sensitive to the setting of their hyperparameters. Recent advances in reverse-mode automatic differentiation allow for optimizing hyperparameters with gradients. The standard way…
In federated learning (FL), clients with limited resources can disrupt the training efficiency. A potential solution to this problem is to leverage a new learning procedure that does not rely on backpropagation (BP). We present a novel…
Although Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative learning in Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) design, it fails to work on low-memory AIoT devices due to its heavy memory usage. To address this problem, various federated…
Deep Learning's outstanding track record across several domains has stemmed from the use of error backpropagation (BP). Several studies, however, have shown that it is impossible to execute BP in a real brain. Also, BP still serves as an…
The application of deep learning to the area of communications systems has been a growing field of interest in recent years. Forward-forward (FF) learning is an efficient alternative to the backpropagation (BP) algorithm, which is the…
Training Neural ODEs requires backpropagating through an ODE solve. The state-of-the-art backpropagation method is recursive checkpointing that balances recomputation with memory cost. Here, we introduce a class of algebraically reversible…
Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning demands significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…