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Related papers: On-Device Fine-Tuning via Backprop-Free Zeroth-Ord…

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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Sadhika Malladi , Tianyu Gao , Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee , Danqi Chen , Sanjeev Arora

Fine-tuning is powerful for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, but it often results in huge memory usages. A promising approach to mitigate this is using Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, which estimates gradients to replace…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Fei Wang , Li Shen , Liang Ding , Chao Xue , Ye Liu , Changxing Ding

On-device fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving personalization of large language models, but mobile devices impose severe memory constraints, typically 6--12GB shared across all workloads. Existing approaches force a trade-off between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Juneyoung Park , Yuri Hong , Seongwan Kim , Jaeho Lee

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is being recognized as a simple yet powerful alternative to standard backpropagation (BP)-based training. Notably, ZO optimization allows for training with only forward passes and (almost) the same memory as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Keisuke Sugiura , Hiroki Matsutani

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Qitao Tan , Sung-En Chang , Rui Xia , Huidong Ji , Chence Yang , Ci Zhang , Jun Liu , Zheng Zhan , Zhenman Fang , Zhou Zou , Yanzhi Wang , Jin Lu , Geng Yuan

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

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

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

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with backpropagation\textemdash even for a subset of parameters such as LoRA\textemdash can be much more memory-consuming than inference and is often deemed impractical for resource-constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Congzheng Song , Xinyu Tang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often faces GPU memory bottlenecks: the backward pass of first-order optimizers like Adam increases memory usage to more than 10 times the inference level (e.g., 633 GB for OPT-30B). Zeroth-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Sizhe Dang , Yangyang Guo , Yanjun Zhao , Haishan Ye , Xiaodong Zheng , Guang Dai , Ivor Tsang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Lei Gao , Amir Ziashahabi , Yue Niu , Salman Avestimehr , Murali Annavaram

Fine-tuning large pre-trained LLMs generally demands extensive GPU memory. Traditional first-order optimizers like SGD encounter substantial difficulties due to increased memory requirements from storing activations and gradients during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Liangyu Wang , Jie Ren , Hang Xu , Junxiao Wang , Huanyi Xie , David E. Keyes , Di Wang

Large language models (LLMs) excel across various tasks, but standard first-order (FO) fine-tuning demands considerable memory, significantly limiting real-world deployment. Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization stood out as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Qitao Tan , Jun Liu , Zheng Zhan , Caiwei Ding , Yanzhi Wang , Xiaolong Ma , Jaewoo Lee , Jin Lu , Geng Yuan

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs under strict memory constraints, as it avoids the prohibitive memory cost of storing activations for backpropagation. However, existing ZO methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Wei Lin , Yining Jiang , Qingyu Song , Qiao Xiang , Hong Xu

In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order (FO) optimizers like SGD and Adam has become standard. Yet, as LLMs grow {in size}, the substantial memory…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across numerous NLP tasks. Nevertheless, conventional first-order fine-tuning techniques impose heavy memory demands, creating practical obstacles to real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zhendong Mi , Qitao Tan , Xiaodong Yu , Zining Zhu , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

Fine-tuning LLMs is necessary for various dedicated downstream tasks, but classic backpropagation-based fine-tuning methods require substantial GPU memory. To this end, a recent work, MeZO, which relies solely on forward passes to fine-tune…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Zhijie Cai , Haolong Chen , Guangxu Zhu

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks using First-Order (FO) optimizers presents significant computational challenges. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods address these by freezing most model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Reza Shirkavand , Peiran Yu , Qi He , Heng Huang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with backpropagation achieves high performance but incurs substantial memory overhead, limiting scalability on resource-constrained hardware. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Shuo Wang , Ziyu Chen , Ming Tang
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