Related papers: Powering Up Zeroth-Order Training via Subspace Gra…
In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators…
Iterative optimization is central to modern artificial intelligence (AI) and provides a crucial framework for understanding adaptive systems. This review provides a unified perspective on this subject, bridging classic theory with neural…
Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…
Zeroth-order or derivative-free optimization (MeZO) is an attractive strategy for finetuning large language models (LLMs) because it eliminates the memory overhead of backpropagation. However, it converges slowly due to the inherent curse…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is being recognized as a simple yet powerful alternative to standard backpropagation (BP)-based training. Notably, ZO optimization allows for training with only forward passes and (almost) the same memory as…
Zeroth-order (ZO) fine-tuning is attractive for large language models because it replaces backpropagation with forward objective evaluations. Existing implementations nevertheless execute ZO algorithms inside conventional training loops,…
Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…
Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…
We study the problem of training neural networks with quantized parameters. Learning low-precision quantized parameters by enabling computation of gradients via the Straight-Through Estimator (STE) can be challenging. While the STE enables…
This paper introduces a class of model-free feedback methods for solving generic constrained optimization problems where the specific mathematical forms of the objective and constraint functions are not available. The proposed methods,…
Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…
A major challenge of applying zeroth-order (ZO) methods is the high query complexity, especially when queries are costly. We propose a novel gradient estimation technique for ZO methods based on adaptive lazy queries that we term as LAZO.…
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable strong multimodal reasoning but incur heavy inference costs from redundant visual tokens. Token pruning alleviates this issue, yet existing approaches face limitations. Attention-based methods rely…
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…
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…
$\ell_0$ constrained optimization is prevalent in machine learning, particularly for high-dimensional problems, because it is a fundamental approach to achieve sparse learning. Hard-thresholding gradient descent is a dominant technique to…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a powerful framework for problems where explicit gradients are unavailable and have to be approximated using only queries to function value. The prevalent single-query approach is simple, but suffers…
Orthogonality-based optimizers, such as Muon, have recently shown strong performance across large-scale training and community-driven efficiency challenges. However, these methods rely on a costly gradient orthogonalization step. Even…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…