Related papers: Learning a Zeroth-Order Optimizer for Fine-Tuning …
Optimizers play an important role in both pretraining and finetuning stages when training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present an observation that full finetuning with the same optimizer as in pretraining achieves a…
We propose a new finetuning method to provide pre-trained large language models (LMs) the ability to scale test-time compute through the diffusion framework. By increasing the number of diffusion steps, we show our finetuned models achieve…
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) Large Language Models (LLM) fundamentally rely on high-quality training data. While data selection and data synthesis are two common strategies to improve data quality, existing approaches often face limitations…
Quantization is an effective technique to reduce the deployment cost of large language models (LLMs), and post-training quantization (PTQ) has been widely studied due to its efficiency. However, existing PTQ methods are limited by their…
Classic zeroth-order optimization approaches typically optimize for a smoothed version of the original function, i.e., the expected objective under randomly perturbed model parameters. This can be interpreted as encouraging the loss values…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have become a prevalent technique in deep learning for code, utilizing a two-stage pre-training and fine-tuning procedure to acquire general knowledge about code and specialize in a variety of downstream…
Mastering a skill generally relies on both hands-on experience from doers and insightful, high-level guidance by mentors. Will this strategy also work well for solving complex non-convex optimization problems? Here, a common gradient-based…
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) incurs considerable training costs, driving the need for data-efficient training with optimised data ordering. Human-inspired strategies offer a solution by organising data based on human learning…
Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving…
In analyzing and assessing the condition of dynamical systems, it is necessary to account for nonlinearity. Recent advances in computation have rendered previously computationally infeasible analyses readily executable on common computer…
This paper introduces a class of model-free feedback methods for solving generic constrained optimization problems where the specific mathematical forms of the objective and constraint functions are not available. The proposed methods,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen great advance in both academia and industry, and their popularity results in numerous open-source frameworks and techniques in accelerating LLM pre-training, fine-tuning, and inference. Training and…
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…
Recent work has demonstrated the promise of orchestrating large language models (LLMs) within evolutionary and agentic optimization systems. However, the mechanisms driving these optimization gains remain poorly understood. In this work, we…
Existing alignment techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), typically treat the model as a monolithic entity, applying uniform optimization pressure across all layers. This approach…
Zero-order optimization techniques are becoming increasingly popular in robotics due to their ability to handle non-differentiable functions and escape local minima. These advantages make them particularly useful for trajectory optimization…
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on many NLP tasks, but fine-tuning them on resource-constrained mobile devices is challenging due to high memory and computation costs, despite growing demands for privacy-preserving…
In this work, we study optimization methods that leverage the linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a norm-ball. We propose a new stochastic family of algorithms that uses the LMO to adapt to the geometry of the problem and, perhaps…
This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions -- substantially…
Fine-tuning is a crucial process for adapting large language models (LLMs) to diverse applications. In certain scenarios, such as multi-tenant serving, deploying multiple LLMs becomes necessary to meet complex demands. Recent studies…