Related papers: Learning a Zeroth-Order Optimizer for Fine-Tuning …

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…

The widespread practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data faces two major challenges in memory and privacy. First, as the size of LLMs continues to grow, the memory demands of gradient-based training…

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…

Lowering the memory requirement in full-parameter training on large models has become a hot research area. MeZO fine-tunes the large language models (LLMs) by just forward passes in a zeroth-order SGD optimizer (ZO-SGD), demonstrating…

Fine-tuning LLMs is necessary for various dedicated downstream tasks, but classic backpropagation-based fine-tuning methods require substantial GPU memory. To this end, a recent work, MeZO, which relies solely on forward passes to fine-tune…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) remains resource-intensive due to their sheer scale. While zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a memory-efficient alternative by eliminating backward passes, its application to…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has demonstrated remarkable promise in efficient fine-tuning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs). In particular, recent advances incorporate the low-rankness of gradients, introducing low-rank ZO estimators…

Safety alignment for large language models (LLMs) aims to reduce harmful or unsafe behavior while preserving general utility. However, recent findings reveal that alignment effects can be fragile: lightweight post-alignment manipulations,…

Fine-tuning vision language models (VLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various downstream tasks; yet, it requires access to model gradients through backpropagation (BP), making them unsuitable for memory-constrained,…

Large language models (LLMs) have brought about significant transformations in human society. Among the crucial computations in LLMs, the softmax unit holds great importance. Its helps the model generating a probability distribution on…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is an emerging deep neural network (DNN) training paradigm that offers computational simplicity and memory savings. However, this seemingly promising approach faces a significant and long-ignored challenge. ZO…

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…

Federated learning enables collaborative model training across numerous edge devices without requiring participants to share data; however, memory and communication constraints on these edge devices may preclude their participation in…

Safe derivative-free optimization under unknown constraints is a fundamental challenge in modern learning and control. Existing zeroth-order (ZO) methods typically still assume access to a first-order oracle of the constraint functions or…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are currently pre-trained and fine-tuned on large cloud servers. The next frontier is LLM personalization, where a foundation model can be fine-tuned with user/task-specific data. Given the sensitive nature of…

Large language model (LLM) unlearning aims to surgically remove the influence of undesired data or knowledge from an existing model while preserving its utility on unrelated tasks. This paradigm has shown promise in addressing privacy and…

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…

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…

Recent research explores optimization using large language models (LLMs) by either iteratively seeking next-step solutions from LLMs or directly prompting LLMs for an optimizer. However, these approaches exhibit inherent limitations,…