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

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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Thomas Pethick , Wanyun Xie , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Zhenyu Zhu , Antonio Silveti-Falls , Volkan Cevher

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a more computationally efficient alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), eliminating the need for reward models and online…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Xin Mao , Feng-Lin Li , Huimin Xu , Wei Zhang , Wang Chen , Anh Tuan Luu

We present an outcome-driven fine-tuning framework that enhances the forecasting capabilities of large language models (LLMs) without relying on human-curated reasoning samples. Our method leverages model self-play to generate pairs of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Benjamin Turtel , Danny Franklin , Philipp Schoenegger

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables large-language-model fine-tuning without storing backpropagation activations, while LoRA supplies compact trainable adapters. Combining them creates a rank paradox: increasing LoRA rank improves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Ziye Chen , Hongbin Lin , Chenyu Zhang , Xiangda Yan , Yongjie Yang , Yao Shu

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

The performance of a deep neural network is highly dependent on its training, and finding better local optimal solutions is the goal of many optimization algorithms. However, existing optimization algorithms show a preference for descent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Huangxing Lin , Weihong Zeng , Xinghao Ding , Yue Huang , Chenxi Huang , John Paisley

Despite some empirical success at correcting exposure bias in machine translation, scheduled sampling algorithms suffer from a major drawback: they incorrectly assume that words in the reference translations and in sampled sequences are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-05-07 Weijia Xu , Xing Niu , Marine Carpuat

In addressing the computational and memory demands of fine-tuning Large Language Models(LLMs), we propose LoRA-SP(Streamlined Partial Parameter Adaptation), a novel approach utilizing randomized half-selective parameter freezing within the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Yichao Wu , Yafei Xiang , Shuning Huo , Yulu Gong , Penghao Liang

Variance reduction techniques are designed to decrease the sampling variance, thereby accelerating convergence rates of first-order (FO) and zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods. However, in composite optimization problems, ZO methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Hao Di , Haishan Ye , Yueling Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Guang Dai , Ivor W. Tsang

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) are rapidly emerging alongside autoregressive models as a powerful paradigm for complex reasoning, with reinforcement learning increasingly used for downstream alignment. Existing trajectory-based RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Ranfei Chen , Ming Chen , Kaifei Wang

Effective training of language models (LMs) for mathematical reasoning tasks demands high-quality supervised fine-tuning data. Besides obtaining annotations from human experts, a common alternative is sampling from larger and more powerful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Tianduo Wang , Shichen Li , Wei Lu

Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization plays an essential role in scenarios where gradient information is inaccessible or unaffordable, such as black-box systems and resource-constrained environments. While existing adaptive methods such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yao Shu , Qixin Zhang , Kun He , Zhongxiang Dai

A major challenge in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is the issue of distribution shift. LLM alignment algorithms rely on static preference datasets, assuming that they accurately represent real-world user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Zaiyan Xu , Sushil Vemuri , Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on many NLP tasks, yet often exhibit order dependence: simply reordering semantically identical tokens (e.g., answer choices in multiple-choice questions) can lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Katrina Brown , Reid McIlroy

Automated optimization modeling via Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to assist complex human decision-making. While post-training has become a pivotal technique to enhance LLMs' capabilities in this domain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Weiting Liu , Han Wu , Yufei Kuang , Xiongwei Han , Tao Zhong , Jianfeng Feng , Wenlian Lu

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective model compression method that can transfer the internal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to smaller ones. However, the multi-modal probability distribution predicted by teacher LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Tianyu Peng , Jiajun Zhang

Continual learning in large language models (LLMs) is prone to catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to new tasks significantly degrades performance on previously learned ones. Existing methods typically rely on low-rank,…

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

Large language models (LLMs) alignment aims to ensure that the behavior of LLMs meets human preferences. While collecting data from multiple fine-grained, aspect-specific preferences becomes more and more feasible, existing alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jia Zhang , Yao Liu , Chen-Xi Zhang , Yi Liu , Yi-Xuan Jin , Lan-Zhe Guo , Yu-Feng Li

In this work, we evaluate 10 open-source instructed LLMs on four representative code comprehension and generation tasks. We have the following main findings. First, for the zero-shot setting, instructed LLMs are very competitive on code…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Zhiqiang Yuan , Junwei Liu , Qiancheng Zi , Mingwei Liu , Xin Peng , Yiling Lou