Related papers: Improving the Straight-Through Estimator with Zero…

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…

Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization plays an essential role in scenarios where gradient information is inaccessible or unaffordable, such as black-box systems and resource-constrained environments. While existing adaptive methods such…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks, yet it demands more and more memory as model sizes keep growing. To address this issue, the recently proposed…

Deep learning models, despite their impressive achievements, suffer from high computational costs and memory requirements, limiting their usability in resource-constrained environments. Sparse neural networks significantly alleviate these…

Accumulated detailed knowledge about the neuronal activities in human brains has brought more attention to bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs). In contrast to non-spiking deep neural networks (DNNs), SNNs can encode and transmit…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has gained attention as a memory-efficient alternative to first-order (FO) methods, particularly in settings where gradient computation is expensive or even impractical. Beyond its memory efficiency, in this…

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or…

First-order optimization methods, such as SGD and Adam, are widely used for training large-scale deep neural networks due to their computational efficiency and robust performance. However, relying solely on gradient information, these…

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…

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) for high-dimensional and high-order partial differential equations (PDEs) are primarily constrained by the $\mathcal{O}(d^k)$ spatial derivative complexity and the $\mathcal{O}(P)$ memory overhead of…

In this work, we consider a distributed multi-agent stochastic optimization problem, where each agent holds a local objective function that is smooth and convex, and that is subject to a stochastic process. The goal is for all agents to…

Effective hyper-parameter tuning is essential to guarantee the performance that neural networks have come to be known for. In this work, a principled approach to choosing the learning rate is proposed for shallow feedforward neural…

Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard approach to adapting pretrained knowledge to improve the accuracy on new sparse, imbalance datasets. However, issues arise when optimization falls into a collapsed state, where the model…

Back propagation (BP) is the default solution for gradient computation in neural network training. However, implementing BP-based training on various edge devices such as FPGA, microcontrollers (MCUs), and analog computing platforms face…

We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

Fast gradient-based optimization algorithms have become increasingly essential for the computationally efficient training of machine learning models. One technique is to multiply the gradient by a preconditioner matrix to produce a step,…

The success of deep learning over the past decade mainly relies on gradient-based optimisation and backpropagation. This paper focuses on analysing the performance of first-order gradient-based optimisation algorithms, gradient descent and…

Inverse problems are essential to imaging applications. In this paper, we propose a model-based deep learning network, named FISTA-Net, by combining the merits of interpretability and generality of the model-based Fast Iterative…

In the learning to learn (L2L) framework, we cast the design of optimization algorithms as a machine learning problem and use deep neural networks to learn the update rules. In this paper, we extend the L2L framework to zeroth-order (ZO)…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, policy gradient methods such as PPO suffer from high variance gradient estimates,…