Related papers: Prior-Informed Zeroth-Order Optimization with Adap…

This report examines the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs), integrating theoretical insights with practical applications. It outlines the historical evolution of LLMs from traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence with capabilities in reasoning, coding, and communication, driving innovation across industries. Their true potential depends on effective alignment to ensure correct,…

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…

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) with the Adam optimizer often demands excessive memory, limiting accessibility. The "in-place" version of Stochastic Gradient Descent (IP-SGD) and Memory-Efficient Zeroth-order Optimizer (MeZO) have been…

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…

Recent research explores optimization using large language models (LLMs) by either iteratively seeking next-step solutions from LLMs or directly prompting LLMs for an optimizer. However, these approaches exhibit inherent limitations,…

We propose Neural Gradient Learning (NGL), a deep learning approach to learn gradient vectors with consistent orientation from 3D point clouds for normal estimation. It has excellent gradient approximation properties for the underlying…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves either full fine-tuning, which updates all model parameters, or Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), which adjusts a small subset of parameters. However, both approaches have…

In this study, we delve into an emerging optimization challenge involving a black-box objective function that can only be gauged via a ranking oracle-a situation frequently encountered in real-world scenarios, especially when the function…

In this letter, we first propose a \underline{Z}eroth-\underline{O}rder c\underline{O}ordinate \underline{M}ethod~(ZOOM) to solve the stochastic optimization problem over a decentralized network with only zeroth-order~(ZO) oracle feedback…

Recognizing the substantial computational cost of backpropagation (BP), non-BP methods have emerged as attractive alternatives for efficient learning on emerging neuromorphic systems. However, existing non-BP approaches still face critical…

Recent optimizers such as Lion and Muon have demonstrated strong empirical performance by normalizing gradient momentum via linear minimization oracles (LMOs). While variance reduction has been explored to accelerate LMO-based methods, it…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable instruction-following capabilities and achieved impressive performances in various applications. However, the performances of LLMs depend heavily on the instructions given to them, which…

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…

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) in real-world applications presents significant challenges, particularly in balancing computational efficiency with model performance. Optimizing acceleration after fine-tuning and during inference is…

Zeroth-order (ZO) methods are widely used when gradients are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, including black-box learning and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large models, yet their optimization dynamics in deep learning remain…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is now a common approach for text classification in a wide range of applications. When labeled documents are scarce, active learning helps save annotation efforts but requires retraining of massive…

LLM post-training typically propagates task gradients through the full depth of the model. Although this end-to-end structure is simple and general, it couples task adaptation to full-depth activation storage, long-range backward…

Prompt engineering, as an efficient and effective way to leverage Large Language Models (LLM), has drawn a lot of attention from the research community. The existing research primarily emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In…