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Related papers: Zero-Order Optimization for LLM Fine-Tuning via Le…

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As Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities learned from vast corpora, concerns regarding data privacy and safety are receiving increasing attention. LLM unlearning, which aims to remove the influence of specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Kai Qin , Jiaqi Wu , Jianxiang He , Haoyuan Sun , Yifei Zhao , Bin Liang , Yongzhe Chang , Tiantian Zhang , Houde Liu

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) across industries has increased the demand for high-quality and customizable outputs. However, traditional alignment methods often require retraining large pretrained models, making it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Yi Liu , Dianqing Liu , Mingye Zhu , Junbo Guo , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with limited data poses a practical challenge in low-resource languages, specialized domains, and constrained deployment settings. While pre-trained LLMs provide strong foundations, effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Marton Szep , Daniel Rueckert , Rüdiger von Eisenhart-Rothe , Florian Hinterwimmer

This study evaluates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, testing three configurations: (1) with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), (2) without SFT, and (3)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Md Nayem Uddin , Chitta Baral

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While prior work has emphasized algorithmic design, data curation, and reward shaping, we investigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Xinjie Chen , Minpeng Liao , Guoxin Chen , Chengxi Li , Biao Fu , Kai Fan , Xinggao Liu

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become a central engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains the dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Mingyang Song , Mao Zheng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Venkatesh Balavadhani Parthasarathy , Ahtsham Zafar , Aafaq Khan , Arsalan Shahid

Since the release of Deepseek-R1, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a central approach for training large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks. Recent work has largely focused on modifying loss functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Weizhe Chen , Sven Koenig , Bistra Dilkina

Retrained large language models (LLMs) have become extensively used across various sub-disciplines of natural language processing (NLP). In NLP, text classification problems have garnered considerable focus, but still faced with some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Zhiqiang Wang , Yiran Pang , Yanbin Lin

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has long been favored for its biological plausibility and its capacity to handle non-differentiable objectives, yet its computational complexity has historically limited its application in deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Sansheng Cao , Zhengyu Ma , Yonghong Tian

Learning from preference labels plays a crucial role in fine-tuning large language models. There are several distinct approaches for preference fine-tuning, including supervised learning, on-policy reinforcement learning (RL), and…

Federated fine-tuning offers a promising approach for tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices while preserving data privacy. However, fine-tuning these models on edge devices remains challenging due to high memory,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Mohamed Aboelenien Ahmed , Kilian Pfeiffer , Ramin Khalili , Heba Khdr , Jörg Henkel

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Zhen Qin , Ziqi Wang , Wei Xiong , Yu Meng , Jiawei Han , Sercan O. Arik

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is intended to improve their reasoning capabilities, yet we uncover a counterintuitive effect: models often forget how to solve problems they previously answered correctly during training. We term…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yuetai Li , Zhangchen Xu , Fengqing Jiang , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Luyao Niu , Bill Yuchen Lin , Xiang Yue , Radha Poovendran

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has gained attention as a memory-efficient alternative to first-order (FO) methods, particularly in settings where gradient computation is expensive or even impractical. Beyond its memory efficiency, in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Wanhao Yu , Zheng Wang , Shuteng Niu , Sen Lin , Li Yang

Data selection for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be framed as a budget-constrained optimization problem: maximizing a model's downstream performance under a strict training data budget. Solving this problem is generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Animesh Jha , Harshit Gupta , Ananjan Nandi

The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Paul Michel

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open…