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The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) arises from their massive scale and heterogeneous module composition. However, this structural heterogeneity introduces additional optimization challenges. While adaptive optimizers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Ziqing Wen , Zhouyang Liu , Jiahuan Wang , Ping Luo , Li Shen , Dongsheng Li , Tao Sun

Prompt engineering for large language models (LLMs) is often a manual time-intensive process that involves generating, evaluating, and refining prompts iteratively to ensure high-quality outputs. While there has been work on automating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Derek Austin , Elliott Chartock

Iterative differential approximation methods that rely upon backpropagation have enabled the optimization of neural networks; however, at present, they remain computationally expensive, especially when training models at scale. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Jake Ryland Williams , Haoran Zhao

Designing efficient optimizers for large language models (LLMs) with low-memory requirements and fast convergence is an important and challenging problem. This paper makes a step towards the systematic design of such optimizers through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Wenbo Gong , Meyer Scetbon , Chao Ma , Edward Meeds

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks has become increasingly crucial due to their widespread use and the growing availability of open-source models. However, the high memory costs associated with fine-tuning remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 David H. Yang , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri , Tejaswini Pedapati , Subhajit Chaudhury , Pin-Yu Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance due to their large parameter counts and extensive training data. However, their scale leads to significant memory bottlenecks during training, especially when using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ziqing Wen , Jiahuan Wang , Ping Luo , Dongsheng Li , Tao Sun

The rapid advancement of large-language models (LLMs) has driven extensive research into parameter compression after training has been completed, yet compression during the training phase remains largely unexplored. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Jun Wu , Jiangtao Wen , Yuxing Han

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) in federated learning (FL) settings has become increasingly important as it allows resource-constrained devices to finetune a model using private data. However, finetuning LLMs using backpropagation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Kunjal Panchal , Nisarg Parikh , Sunav Choudhary , Lijun Zhang , Yuriy Brun , Hui Guan

Training large language models (LLMs) is highly resource-intensive due to their massive number of parameters and the overhead of optimizer states. While recent work has aimed to reduce memory consumption, such efforts often entail…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Sahar Rajabi , Nayeema Nonta , Sirisha Rambhatla

We propose GradPower, a lightweight gradient-transformation technique for accelerating language model pre-training. Given a gradient vector $g=(g_i)_i$, GradPower first applies the elementwise sign-power transformation: $\varphi_p(g)=({\rm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jinbo Wang , Mingze Wang , Jiaqi Zhang , Wei Wang , Peng Pei , Xunliang Cai , Weinan E , Lei Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but also present risks such as biased content generation and privacy issues. One of the current alignment techniques includes principle-driven integration, but it faces challenges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yi Luo , Zhenghao Lin , Yuhao Zhang , Jiashuo Sun , Chen Lin , Chengjin Xu , Xiangdong Su , Yelong Shen , Jian Guo , Yeyun Gong

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) on language modeling and emergent capabilities make them a promising reference-free evaluator of natural language generation quality, and a competent alternative to human evaluation.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Yuxuan Liu , Tianchi Yang , Shaohan Huang , Zihan Zhang , Haizhen Huang , Furu Wei , Weiwei Deng , Feng Sun , Qi Zhang

The AdamW optimizer, while standard for LLM pretraining, is a critical memory bottleneck, consuming optimizer states equivalent to twice the model's size. Although light-state optimizers like SinkGD attempt to address this issue, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Wooin Lee , Hyun-Tae Kim

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Niao He

Modern adaptive optimization methods, such as Adam and its variants, have emerged as the most widely used tools in deep learning over recent years. These algorithms offer automatic mechanisms for dynamically adjusting the update step based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Son Nguyen , Bo Liu , Lizhang Chen , Qiang Liu

Quantization is a key method for reducing the GPU memory requirement of training large language models (LLMs). Yet, current approaches are ineffective for 4-bit activations and 8-bit gradients, which would easily cause slow convergence or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Wenxiang Lin , Juntao Huang , Luhan Zhang , Laili Li , Xiang Bao , Mengyang Zhang , Bing Wang , Shaohuai Shi

Accelerator memory and networking constraints have emerged as dominant bottlenecks when training large language models LLMs with billions of parameters. Existing low rank gradient estimators such as GaLoRE and FLORA compress gradients and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Matan Haroush , Daniel Soudry

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various tasks, but the escalating demands on computational resources pose significant challenges, particularly in the extensive utilization of full fine-tuning for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Jia-Hong Huang , Yixian Shen , Hongyi Zhu , Stevan Rudinac , Evangelos Kanoulas

Adaptive first-order optimizers are fundamental tools in deep learning, although they may suffer from poor generalization due to the nonuniform gradient scaling. In this work, we propose AdamL, a novel variant of the Adam optimizer, that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Lu Xia , Stefano Massei

We introduce AlphaGrad, a memory-efficient, conditionally stateless optimizer addressing the memory overhead and hyperparameter complexity of adaptive methods like Adam. AlphaGrad enforces scale invariance via tensor-wise L2 gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Soham Sane