Related papers: Mano: Restriking Manifold Optimization for LLM Tra…

Preference alignment is an essential step in adapting large language models (LLMs) to human values, but existing approaches typically depend on costly human annotations or large-scale API-based models. We explore whether a weak LLM can…

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems require balancing competing objectives, often under constraints. The Pareto optimal solution set defines all possible optimal trade-offs over such objectives. In this work, we present a novel…

In this work, we study optimization methods that leverage the linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a norm-ball. We propose a new stochastic family of algorithms that uses the LMO to adapt to the geometry of the problem and, perhaps…

The high cost and data scarcity in scientific exploration have motivated the use of large language models (LLMs) as knowledge-driven components in Bayesian optimization (BO). However, existing approaches typically embed LLMs directly into…

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as LLaVA-series models, are driven by massive machine-generated instruction-following data tuning. Such automatic instruction collection pipelines, however, inadvertently…

Muon optimizer has demonstrated robust results in pretraining of language models but its performance in finetuning of existing public pretrained models is not yet explored. Currently, Muon is used along with AdamW introducing a scope of…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse applications, yet their deployment remains challenging due to substantial computational costs, memory requirements, and energy consumption. Recent empirical…

Nowadays, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been trained using extended context lengths to foster more creative applications. However, long context training poses great challenges considering the constraint of GPU memory. It not only leads…

Learning to optimize (L2O) is an emerging approach that leverages machine learning to develop optimization methods, aiming at reducing the laborious iterations of hand engineering. It automates the design of an optimization method based on…

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…

Traditional approaches for designing analog circuits are time-consuming and require significant human expertise. Existing automation efforts using methods like Bayesian Optimization (BO) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are sub-optimal and…

For a long period of time, Adam has served as the ubiquitous default choice for training deep neural networks. Recently, many new optimizers have been introduced, out of which Muon has perhaps gained the highest popularity due to its…

The rapid scaling of models has led to prohibitively high training and fine-tuning costs. A major factor accounting for memory consumption is the widespread use of stateful optimizers (e.g., Adam), which maintain auxiliary information of…

AI inference scaling is often tuned through 1D heuristics (a fixed reasoning pass) or 2D bivariate trade-offs (e.g., accuracy vs. compute), which fail to consider cost and latency constraints. We introduce a 3D optimization framework that…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for enhancing LLMs' safety, helpfulness, humor, faithfulness, etc. Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) mainly focuses on a fixed reward learned…

Learned optimizers (LOs) have the potential to significantly reduce the wall-clock training time of neural networks. However, they can struggle to optimize unseen tasks (meta-generalize), especially when training networks wider than those…

Large language models (LLMs) excel in general tasks but struggle with domain-specific ones, requiring fine-tuning with specific data. With many open-source LLMs available, selecting the best model for fine-tuning downstream tasks is…

Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) based large language models (LLMs), such as the recent Mixtral and DeepSeek-MoE, have shown great promise in scaling model size without suffering from the quadratic growth of training cost of dense transformers. Like…

Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems. In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced cognitive tasks, often matching or even surpassing…