Related papers: The Cost of Avoiding Backpropagation

While fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks often yields impressive results, it comes at the cost of memory inefficiency due to back-propagation in gradient-based training. Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO)…

Forward Gradients - the idea of using directional derivatives in forward differentiation mode - have recently been shown to be utilizable for neural network training while avoiding problems generally associated with backpropagation gradient…

This paper offers a novel mathematical approach, the modified Fractional-order Steepest Descent Method (FSDM) for training BackPropagation Neural Networks (BPNNs); this differs from the majority of the previous approaches and as such. A…

We study the problem of training neural networks with quantized parameters. Learning low-precision quantized parameters by enabling computation of gradients via the Straight-Through Estimator (STE) can be challenging. While the STE enables…

We propose a memory efficient method, named Stochastic Backpropagation (SBP), for training deep neural networks on videos. It is based on the finding that gradients from incomplete execution for backpropagation can still effectively train…

A major challenge of applying zeroth-order (ZO) methods is the high query complexity, especially when queries are costly. We propose a novel gradient estimation technique for ZO methods based on adaptive lazy queries that we term as LAZO.…

Fine-tuning is powerful for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, but it often results in huge memory usages. A promising approach to mitigate this is using Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, which estimates gradients to replace…

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)…

There is an increasing need for algorithms that can accurately detect changepoints in long time-series, or equivalent, data. Many common approaches to detecting changepoints, for example based on penalised likelihood or minimum description…

Gradient descent and backpropagation have enabled neural networks to achieve remarkable results in many real-world applications. Despite ongoing success, training a neural network with gradient descent can be a slow and strenuous affair. We…

Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO) provides powerful tools for optimizing functions where explicit gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. However, the underlying mechanisms of popular ZOO methods, particularly those employing…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…

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…

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…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) with the Adam optimizer often demands excessive memory, limiting accessibility. The "in-place" version of Stochastic Gradient Descent (IP-SGD) and Memory-Efficient Zeroth-order Optimizer (MeZO) have been…

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…

Modern language models have historically relied on two dominant design choices: subword tokenization and autoregressive (AR) ordering. These design decisions bake in priors that dictate a model's learning. Recently, two alternative…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method to optimize expensive black-box functions. It efficiently tunes machine learning algorithms under the implicit assumption that hyperparameter evaluations cost approximately the same. In…

Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied…