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Related papers: Zero-Order Sharpness-Aware Minimization

200 papers

Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-03 Liu Liu , Minhao Cheng , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Dacheng Tao

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-16 Yuke Zhou , Ruiyang Jin , Siyang Gao , Jianxiao Wang , Jie Song

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become increasingly popular and important in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), especially on edge devices due to its ability to adjust the model to local data without the need for memory-intensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jiahe Chen , Ziye Ma

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order methods like back-propagation is computationally intensive. Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimisation uses function evaluations instead of gradients, reducing memory usage, but suffers from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Alessio Galatolo , Zhenbang Dai , Katie Winkle , Meriem Beloucif

This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Charles Audet , Jean Bigeon , Romain Couderc , Michael Kokkolaras

In this work we address the problem of convex optimization in a multi-agent setting where the objective is to minimize the mean of local cost functions whose derivatives are not available (e.g. black-box models). Moreover agents can only…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-14 Alessio Maritan , Luca Schenato

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces memory costs when adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream applications. However, traditional first-order (FO) fine-tuning algorithms incur substantial memory overhead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Yiming Chen , Yuan Zhang , Liyuan Cao , Kun Yuan , Zaiwen Wen

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has demonstrated remarkable promise in efficient fine-tuning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs). In particular, recent advances incorporate the low-rankness of gradients, introducing low-rank ZO estimators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Yan Sun , Tiansheng Huang , Liang Ding , Li Shen , Dacheng Tao

We investigate the effectiveness of adaptive zeroth-order (ZO) optimization for memory-constrained fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Contrary to prior claims, we show that adaptive ZO methods such as ZO-Adam offer no convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Hassan Dbouk , Nidham Gazagnadou , Matthias Reisser , Christos Louizos

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) is essential for enabling deep learning models to handle real-world data distribution shifts. However, current approaches face significant limitations: backpropagation-based methods are not suitable for low-end…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Xingyu Wang , Tao Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Wanhao Yu , Zheng Wang , Shuteng Niu , Sen Lin , Li Yang

Deep neural networks achieve high performance across many domains but can still face challenges in generalization when optimization is influenced by small or noisy gradient components. Sharpness-Aware Minimization improves generalization by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Vincent-Daniel Yun

While fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks often yields impressive results, it comes at the cost of memory inefficiency due to back-propagation in gradient-based training. Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yong Liu , Zirui Zhu , Chaoyu Gong , Minhao Cheng , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Yang You

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-06 Zhongruo Wang , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma , Meisam Razaviyayn

Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-19 Feihu Huang , Bin Gu , Zhouyuan Huo , Songcan Chen , Heng Huang

Federated learning enables collaborative model training across numerous edge devices without requiring participants to share data; however, memory and communication constraints on these edge devices may preclude their participation in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Gwen Legate , Irina Rish , Eugene Belilovsky

As the capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) advance, they can process increasingly large inputs, which, unlike in LLMs, generates significant visual token redundancy and leads to prohibitive inference costs. While many methods aim…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Pu Zhang , Yuwei Li , Xingyuan Xian , Guoming Tang

Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning demands significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zhen Zhang , Yifan Yang , Kai Zhen , Nathan Susanj , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Siegfried Kunzmann , Zheng Zhang

We study robust parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques designed to improve accuracy and generalization while operating within strict computational and memory hardware constraints, specifically focusing on large-language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yehonathan Refael , Iftach Arbel , Ofir Lindenbaum , Tom Tirer

The goal of Open-Vocabulary Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (OV-CZSL) is to recognize attribute-object compositions in the open-vocabulary setting, where compositions of both seen and unseen attributes and objects are evaluated. Recently,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yihang Duan , Jiong Wang , Pengpeng Zeng , Ji Zhang , Lei Zhao , Chong Wang , Jingkuan Song , Lianli Gao