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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

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Zhendong Mi , Qitao Tan , Grace Li Zhang , Zhaozhuo Xu , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Sihwan Park , Jihun Yun , SungYub Kim , Souvik Kundu , Eunho Yang

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

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a gradient-free alternative to first-order (FO) methods by estimating gradients via finite differences of function evaluations, and has recently emerged as a memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yicheng Lang , Changsheng Wang , Yihua Zhang , Mingyi Hong , Zheng Zhang , Wotao Yin , Sijia Liu

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has demonstrated success in a wide array of downstream tasks. However, as LMs are scaled up, the memory requirements for backpropagation become prohibitively high. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Tanmay Gautam , Youngsuk Park , Hao Zhou , Parameswaran Raman , Wooseok Ha

We introduce LOREN, a curvature-aware zeroth-order (ZO) optimization method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). Existing ZO methods, which estimate gradients via finite differences using random perturbations, often suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Hyunseok Seung , Jaewoo Lee , Hyunsuk Ko

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Yet traditional first-order optimizers such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adam incur prohibitive memory and computational…

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

Lowering the memory requirement in full-parameter training on large models has become a hot research area. MeZO fine-tunes the large language models (LLMs) by just forward passes in a zeroth-order SGD optimizer (ZO-SGD), demonstrating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Shuoran Jiang , Qingcai Chen , Youchen Pan , Yang Xiang , Yukang Lin , Xiangping Wu , Chuanyi Liu , Xiaobao Song

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

The confluence of Federated Learning (FL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) is ushering in a new era in privacy-preserving natural language processing. However, the intensive memory requirements for fine-tuning LLMs pose significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhenqing Ling , Daoyuan Chen , Liuyi Yao , Yaliang Li , Ying Shen

Zeroth-Order optimization presents a promising memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models by relying solely on forward passes. However, its practical adoption is severely constrained by slow wall-clock convergence and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Fei Wang , Li Shen , Liang Ding , Chao Xue , Ye Liu , Changxing Ding

As the size of large language models grows exponentially, GPU memory has become a bottleneck for adapting these models to downstream tasks. In this paper, we aim to push the limits of memory-efficient training by minimizing memory usage on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Sifeng Shang , Jiayi Zhou , Chenyu Lin , Minxian Li , Kaiyang Zhou

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) poses significant memory challenges, as the back-propagation process demands extensive resources, especially with growing model sizes. Recent work, MeZO, addresses this issue using a zeroth-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Huaqin Zhao , Jiaxi Li , Yi Pan , Shizhe Liang , Xiaofeng Yang , Wei Liu , Xiang Li , Fei Dou , Tianming Liu , Jin Lu

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 pretrained language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of modern NLP, yet its growing memory demands (driven by backpropagation and large optimizer States) limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Zero-order (ZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Valery Parfenov , Grigoriy Evseev , Andrey Veprikov , Nikolay Bushkov , Stanislav Moiseev , Aleksandr Beznosikov

Fine-tuning vision language models (VLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various downstream tasks; yet, it requires access to model gradients through backpropagation (BP), making them unsuitable for memory-constrained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yifan Yang , Zhen Zhang , Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan , Jing Liu , Nathan Susanj , Zheng Zhang

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