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Related papers: FOZO: Forward-Only Zeroth-Order Prompt Optimizatio…

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Deep neural networks often encounter significant performance drops while facing with domain shifts between training (source) and test (target) data. To address this issue, Test Time Adaptation (TTA) methods have been proposed to adapt…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Siqi Luo , Yi Xin , Yuntao Du , Tao Tan , Guangtao Zhai , Xiaohong Liu

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

Prompt learning has become a key method for adapting large language models to specific tasks with limited data. However, traditional gradient-based optimization methods for tuning prompts are computationally intensive, posing challenges for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Yao Fu , Yihang Jin , Chunxia Zhang , Junmin Liu , Guang Dai , Haishan Ye

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success across various NLP tasks, but the substantial memory overhead during backpropagation remains a critical bottleneck, especially as model scales grow. Zeroth-order (ZO)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Feihu Jin , Shipeng Cen , Ying Tan

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a promising paradigm for vision-language models (VLMs) to bridge the distribution gap between pre-training and test data. Recent works have focused on backpropagation-free TTA methods that rely on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zhaohong Huang , Yuxin Zhang , Wenjing Liu , Fei Chao , Rongrong Ji

Large language models are highly sensitive to prompt wording. However, popular automatic prompt search methods, including InstructZero, often degrade under distribution shift and adversarial evaluation because they optimize expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Yangyang Li

This paper presents a simple yet effective approach that improves continual test-time adaptation (TTA) in a memory-efficient manner. TTA may primarily be conducted on edge devices with limited memory, so reducing memory is crucial but has…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Junha Song , Jungsoo Lee , In So Kweon , Sungha Choi

Adapting pretrained models typically involves a trade-off between the high training costs of backpropagation and the heavy inference overhead of memory-based or in-context learning. We propose FAAST, a forward-only associative adaptation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Guangsheng Bao , Hongbo Zhang , Han Cui , Ke Sun , Yanbin Zhao , Juncai He , Yue Zhang

Speech Foundation Models encounter significant performance degradation when deployed in real-world scenarios involving acoustic domain shifts, such as background noise and speaker accents. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has recently emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Jiaheng Dong , Hong Jia , Soumyajit Chatterjee , Abhirup Ghosh , James Bailey , Ting Dang

Real-world systems often encounter new data over time, which leads to experiencing target domain shifts. Existing Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods tend to apply computationally heavy and memory-intensive backpropagation-based approaches…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Yanshuo Wang , Ali Cheraghian , Zeeshan Hayder , Jie Hong , Sameera Ramasinghe , Shafin Rahman , David Ahmedt-Aristizabal , Xuesong Li , Lars Petersson , Mehrtash Harandi

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks using First-Order (FO) optimizers presents significant computational challenges. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods address these by freezing most model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Reza Shirkavand , Peiran Yu , Qi He , Heng Huang

Online Test-Time Adaptation (OTTA) has emerged as an effective strategy to handle distributional shifts, allowing on-the-fly adaptation of pre-trained models to new target domains during inference, without the need for source data. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-14 WeiQin Chuah , Ruwan Tennakoon , Alireza Bab-Hadiashar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Hassan Dbouk , Nidham Gazagnadou , Matthias Reisser , Christos Louizos

Test-time adaptation (TTA) allows a model to be adapted to an unseen domain without accessing the source data. Due to the nature of practical environments, TTA has a limited amount of data for adaptation. Recent TTA methods further restrict…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Younggeol Cho , Youngrae Kim , Junho Yoon , Seunghoon Hong , Dongman Lee

Fine-tuning vision language models (VLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various downstream tasks; yet, it requires access to model gradients through backpropagation (BP), making them unsuitable for memory-constrained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yifan Yang , Zhen Zhang , Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan , Jing Liu , Nathan Susanj , Zheng Zhang

As 6G and beyond networks grow increasingly complex and interconnected, federated learning (FL) emerges as an indispensable paradigm for securely and efficiently leveraging decentralized edge data for AI. By virtue of the superposition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Jonggyu Jang , Hyeonsu Lyu , David J. Love , Hyun Jong Yang

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zelin Li , Caiwen Ding

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

Large time series models (LTMs) have emerged as powerful tools for universal forecasting, yet they often struggle with the inherent diversity and nonstationarity of real-world time series data, leading to an unsatisfactory trade-off between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yunzhong Qiu , Zhiyao Cen , Zhongyi Pei , Chen Wang , Jianmin Wang

Optimizing large-scale nonconvex problems, common in deep learning, demands balancing rapid convergence with computational efficiency. First-order (FO) optimizers, which serve as today's baselines, provide fast convergence and good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jiahe Chen , Ziye Ma