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Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Haishan Ye , Luo Luo

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) poses significant memory challenges, as the back-propagation process demands extensive resources, especially with growing model sizes. Recent work, MeZO, addresses this issue using a zeroth-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Huaqin Zhao , Jiaxi Li , Yi Pan , Shizhe Liang , Xiaofeng Yang , Wei Liu , Xiang Li , Fei Dou , Tianming Liu , Jin Lu

Zeroth-order (ZO, also known as derivative-free) methods, which estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, have attracted much attention recently because of its broad applications in machine learning community. The two function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Zhou Zhai , Bin Gu , Heng Huang

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables memory-efficient training of neural networks by estimating gradients via forward passes only, eliminating the need for backpropagation. However, the stochastic nature of gradient estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Chen Zhang , Yuxin Cheng , Chenchen Ding , Shuqi Wang , Jingreng Lei , Runsheng Yu , Yik-Chung WU , Ngai Wong

Within the realm of software engineering, specialized tasks on code, such as program repair, present unique challenges, necessitating fine-tuning Large language models~(LLMs) to unlock state-of-the-art performance. Fine-tuning approaches…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Boyang Yang , Haoye Tian , Jiadong Ren , Hongyu Zhang , Jacques Klein , Tegawendé F. Bissyandé , Claire Le Goues , Shunfu Jin

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. Typically, LLMs are first pre-trained on large corpora and subsequently fine-tuned on task-specific datasets. However, during fine-tuning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yupeng Chen , Senmiao Wang , Yushun Zhang , Zhihang Lin , Haozhe Zhang , Weijian Sun , Tian Ding , Ruoyu Sun

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with limited data poses a practical challenge in low-resource languages, specialized domains, and constrained deployment settings. While pre-trained LLMs provide strong foundations, effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Marton Szep , Daniel Rueckert , Rüdiger von Eisenhart-Rothe , Florian Hinterwimmer

Large language models (LLMs) are still struggling in aligning with human preference in complex tasks and scenarios. They are prone to overfit into the unexpected patterns or superficial styles in the training data. We conduct an empirical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Jingyuan Wang , Ji-Rong Wen

Since the release of GPT2-1.5B in 2019, the large language models (LLMs) have evolved from specialized deep models to versatile foundation models. While demonstrating remarkable zero-shot ability, the LLMs still require fine-tuning on local…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Yanjie Dong , Haijun Zhang , Chengming Li , Song Guo , Victor C. M. Leung , Xiping Hu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Keisuke Sugiura , Hiroki Matsutani

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Sansheng Cao , Zhengyu Ma , Yonghong Tian

We propose Zeroth-Order Random Matrix Search for Learning from Demonstrations (ZORMS-LfD). ZORMS-LfD enables the costs, constraints, and dynamics of constrained optimal control problems, in both continuous and discrete time, to be learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Olivia Dry , Timothy L. Molloy , Wanxin Jin , Iman Shames

Automatic performance tuning (auto-tuning) is essential for optimizing high-performance applications, where vast and irregular search spaces make manual exploration infeasible. While auto-tuners traditionally rely on classical approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Floris-Jan Willemsen , Niki van Stein , Ben van Werkhoven

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

The efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and generating natural language has aroused a wide interest in developing prompt-based methods to harness the power of black-box LLMs. Existing methodologies usually prioritize a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Wenyang Hu , Yao Shu , Zongmin Yu , Zhaoxuan Wu , Xiangqiang Lin , Zhongxiang Dai , See-Kiong Ng , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have emphasized the critical role of fine-tuning (FT) techniques in adapting LLMs to specific tasks, especially when retraining from scratch is computationally infeasible. Fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Xiao Han , Zimo Zhao , Wanyu Wang , Maolin Wang , Zitao Liu , Yi Chang , Xiangyu Zhao

This report examines the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs), integrating theoretical insights with practical applications. It outlines the historical evolution of LLMs from traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Venkatesh Balavadhani Parthasarathy , Ahtsham Zafar , Aafaq Khan , Arsalan Shahid

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Sihwan Park , Jihun Yun , SungYub Kim , Souvik Kundu , Eunho Yang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Junbin Qiu , Zhengpeng Xie , Xiangda Yan , Yongjie Yang , Yao Shu

The increasing computational and memory demands in deep learning present significant challenges, especially in resource-constrained environments. We introduce a zero-order quantized optimization (ZOQO) method designed for training models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Noga Bar , Raja Giryes