Related papers: More Than Memory Savings: Zeroth-Order Optimizatio…

In continual learning, networks confront a trade-off between stability and plasticity when trained on a sequence of tasks. To bolster plasticity without sacrificing stability, we propose a novel training algorithm called LRFR. This approach…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is widely used to handle challenging tasks, such as query-based black-box adversarial attacks and reinforcement learning. Various attempts have been made to integrate prior information into the gradient…

We investigate accelerated zeroth-order algorithms for smooth composite convex optimization problems. While for unconstrained optimization, existing methods that merge 2-point zeroth-order gradient estimators with first-order frameworks…

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…

Non-analytical objectives and constraints often arise in control systems, particularly in problems with complex dynamics, which are challenging yet lack efficient solution methods. In this work, we consider general constrained optimization…

Online Continual Learning (CL) solves the problem of learning the ever-emerging new classification tasks from a continuous data stream. Unlike its offline counterpart, in online CL, the training data can only be seen once. Most existing…

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…

Continual learning (CL) refers to a machine learning paradigm that learns continuously without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Thereby, major difficulty in CL is catastrophic forgetting of preceding tasks, caused by shifts in data…

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…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables large-language-model fine-tuning without storing backpropagation activations, while LoRA supplies compact trainable adapters. Combining them creates a rank paradox: increasing LoRA rank improves…

Backpropagation provides a generalized configuration for overcoming catastrophic forgetting. Optimizers such as SGD and Adam are commonly used for weight updates in continual learning and continual pre-training. However, access to gradient…

Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…

Recent studies suggest that Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is inherently more resilient to catastrophic forgetting than Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, whether RFT (e.g., GRPO) can effectively overcome forgetting in challenging…

We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a powerful framework for problems where explicit gradients are unavailable and have to be approximated using only queries to function value. The prevalent single-query approach is simple, but suffers…

In the evolving landscape of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), the pretrain-then-finetune paradigm has yielded impressive results. However, the persistent challenge of Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) remains a hurdle. While previous work has…

Large language models are commonly trained through multi-stage post-training: first via RLHF, then fine-tuned for other downstream objectives. Yet even small downstream updates can compromise earlier learned behaviors (e.g., safety),…

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,…

Continual Learning (CL) algorithms incrementally learn a predictor or representation across multiple sequentially observed tasks. Designing CL algorithms that perform reliably and avoid so-called catastrophic forgetting has proven a…

Heterogeneity in federated learning (FL) is a critical and challenging aspect that significantly impacts model performance and convergence. In this paper, we propose a novel framework by formulating heterogeneous FL as a hierarchical…