Related papers: Zero-Order Sharpness-Aware Minimization
In today's heavily overparameterized models, the value of the training loss provides few guarantees on model generalization ability. Indeed, optimizing only the training loss value, as is commonly done, can easily lead to suboptimal model…
Robust and stochastic optimal control problem (OCP) formulations allow a systematic treatment of uncertainty, but are typically associated with a high computational cost. The recently proposed zero-order robust optimization (zoRO) algorithm…
Recent studies have demonstrated that natural-language prompts can help to leverage the knowledge learned by pre-trained language models for the binary sentence-level sentiment classification task. Specifically, these methods utilize…
Targeting solutions over `flat' regions of the loss landscape, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a powerful tool to improve generalizability of deep neural network based learning. While several SAM variants have been…
This work introduces ZetA, a novel deep learning optimizer that extends Adam by incorporating dynamic scaling based on the Riemann zeta function. To the best of our knowledge, ZetA is the first optimizer to apply zeta-based gradient scaling…
Incentive-based load curtailment unlocks critical demand-side flexibility but is hindered by the limited knowledge of private user parameters and the inherent nonsmoothness of responses due to physical device constraints. We address this…
The Muon optimizer has recently offered a promising alternative to AdamW for large language model training, leveraging matrix orthogonalization to produce geometry-aware updates. However, like all first-order methods, Muon can become…
Stochastic zeroth-order (SZO), or gradient-free, optimization allows to optimize arbitrary functions by relying only on function evaluations under parameter perturbations, however, the iteration complexity of SZO methods suffers a factor…
Little research explores the correlation between the expressive ability and generalization ability of the low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves model generalization for both Convolutional Neural Networks…
Zeroth-order (a.k.a, derivative-free) methods are a class of effective optimization methods for solving complex machine learning problems, where gradients of the objective functions are not available or computationally prohibitive.…
Robust loss minimization is an important strategy for handling robust learning issue on noisy labels. Current robust loss functions, however, inevitably involve hyperparameter(s) to be tuned, manually or heuristically through cross…
This paper explores the performance of a random Gaussian smoothing zeroth-order (ZO) scheme for minimising quasar-convex (QC) and strongly quasar-convex (SQC) functions in both unconstrained and constrained settings. For the unconstrained…
Despite the promise of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models as generalist robotic controllers, their robustness against perceptual noise and environmental variations in out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks remains fundamentally limited by the…
Rank-based zeroth-order (ZO) optimization -- which relies only on the ordering of function evaluations -- offers strong robustness to noise and monotone transformations, and underlies many successful algorithms such as CMA-ES, natural…
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,…
Vision-language models have recently shown strong generalization in zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD), enabling the detection of unseen anomalies without task-specific supervision. However, existing approaches typically rely on fixed…
In NLP, Zero-Shot Classification (ZSC) has become essential for enabling models to classify text into categories unseen during training, particularly in low-resource languages and domains where labeled data is scarce. While pretrained…
Single-point zeroth-order optimization (SZO) is useful in solving online black-box optimization and control problems in time-varying environments, as it queries the function value only once at each time step. However, the vanilla SZO method…
Pretraining optimizers are tuned to produce the strongest possible base model, on the assumption that a stronger starting point yields a stronger model after subsequent changes like post-training and quantization. This overlooks the…
Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has yielded success on diverse downstream tasks, but as LMs grow in size, backpropagation requires a prohibitively large amount of memory. Zeroth-order (ZO) methods can in principle estimate gradients using…