Related papers: Zero-Order Sharpness-Aware Minimization

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a crucial method for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), with its effectiveness influenced by two key factors: rank selection and weight initialization. While numerous LoRA variants have been…

In this paper, we study the problem of constrained robust (min-max) optimization ina black-box setting, where the desired optimizer cannot access the gradients of the objective function but may query its values. We present a principled…

Soft prompt tuning leverages continuous embeddings to capture task-specific information in large pre-trained language models (LLMs), achieving competitive performance in few-shot settings. However, soft prompts rely on high-dimensional,…

In recent years, prompt tuning has proven effective in adapting pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks. These methods aim to adapt the pre-trained models by introducing learnable prompts while keeping pre-trained weights…

We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…

We propose RSO (random search optimization), a gradient free Markov Chain Monte Carlo search based approach for training deep neural networks. To this end, RSO adds a perturbation to a weight in a deep neural network and tests if it reduces…

The demand for efficient natural language processing (NLP) systems has led to the development of lightweight language models. Previous work in this area has primarily focused on manual design or training-based neural architecture search…

We study the problem of training neural networks with quantized parameters. Learning low-precision quantized parameters by enabling computation of gradients via the Straight-Through Estimator (STE) can be challenging. While the STE enables…

Federated optimization, an emerging paradigm which finds wide real-world applications such as federated learning, enables multiple clients (e.g., edge devices) to collaboratively optimize a global function. The clients do not share their…

Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning black-box large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have likewise been shown to…

Fine-tuning large language models is essential for task-specific adaptation, yet it remains computationally prohibitive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a solution, but current approaches typically ignore the…

Proper optimization of deep neural networks is an open research question since an optimal procedure to change the learning rate throughout training is still unknown. Manually defining a learning rate schedule involves troublesome…

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

The development of large vision-language models, notably CLIP, has catalyzed research into effective adaptation techniques, with a particular focus on soft prompt tuning. Conjointly, test-time augmentation, which utilizes multiple augmented…

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize subtle differences in meaning or the combination of states and objects through the use of known and unknown concepts during training. Existing methods either focused on prompt…

In this paper, we consider a distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problem, which is about minimizing a sum of $n$ local cost functions over a network with only zeroth-order information. A novel single-loop Decentralized…

Low-rank adaptation, also known as LoRA, has emerged as a prominent method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of foundation models. Despite its computational efficiency, LoRA still yields inferior performance compared to full fine-tuning.…

We provide the first generalization error analysis for black-box learning through derivative-free optimization. Under the assumption of a Lipschitz and smooth unknown loss, we consider the Zeroth-order Stochastic Search (ZoSS) algorithm,…

Zero-shot quantization aims to learn a quantized model from a pre-trained full-precision model with no access to original real training data. The common idea in zero-shot quantization approaches is to generate synthetic data for quantizing…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining significant popularity in recent years for specialized tasks using prompts due to their low computational cost. Standard methods like prefix tuning utilize special, modifiable tokens that lack…