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Related papers: ZO-SAM: Zero-Order Sharpness-Aware Minimization fo…

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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

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Ruiyang Jin , Yuke Zhou , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Siyang Gao

Fine-tuning pre-trained speech foundation models for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is prevalent, yet constrained by substantial GPU memory requirements. We introduce ZO-ASR, a memory-efficient Zeroth-Order (ZO) method that avoids…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yuezhang Peng , Yuxin Liu , Yao Li , Sheng Wang , Fei Wen , Xie Chen

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in developing optimization algorithms for overparameterized models as achieving generalization is believed to require algorithms with suitable biases. This interest centers on minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Behrooz Tahmasebi , Ashkan Soleymani , Dara Bahri , Stefanie Jegelka , Patrick Jaillet

Recently, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has attracted much attention because of its surprising effectiveness in improving generalization performance. However, compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it is more prone to getting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Chengli Tan , Jiangshe Zhang , Junmin Liu , Yicheng Wang , Yunda Hao

Fine-tuning large pretrained language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of modern NLP, yet its growing memory demands (driven by backpropagation and large optimizer States) limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Zero-order (ZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Valery Parfenov , Grigoriy Evseev , Andrey Veprikov , Nikolay Bushkov , Stanislav Moiseev , Aleksandr Beznosikov

Pretraining optimizers are tuned to produce the strongest possible base model, on the assumption that a stronger starting point yields a stronger model after subsequent changes like post-training and quantization. This overlooks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ishaan Watts , Catherine Li , Sachin Goyal , Jacob Mitchell Springer , Aditi Raghunathan

Large language models (LLMs) excel across various tasks, but standard first-order (FO) fine-tuning demands considerable memory, significantly limiting real-world deployment. Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization stood out as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Qitao Tan , Jun Liu , Zheng Zhan , Caiwei Ding , Yanzhi Wang , Xiaolong Ma , Jaewoo Lee , Jin Lu , Geng Yuan

We characterize the effectiveness of Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) under machine unlearning scheme, where unlearning forget signals interferes with learning retain signals. While previous work prove that SAM improves generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Haoran Tang , Rajiv Khanna

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is known to improve the generalization performance of neural networks. However, it is not widely used in real-world applications yet due to its expensive model perturbation cost. A few variants of SAM have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Sunwoo Lee

Network quantization is a dominant paradigm of model compression. However, the abrupt changes in quantized weights during training often lead to severe loss fluctuations and result in a sharp loss landscape, making the gradients unstable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Jing Liu , Jianfei Cai , Bohan Zhuang

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a recent optimization framework aiming to improve the deep neural network generalization, through obtaining flatter (i.e. less sharp) solutions. As SAM has been numerically successful, recent papers…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-22 Kayhan Behdin , Rahul Mazumder

Federated learning enables collaborative model training across numerous edge devices without requiring participants to share data; however, memory and communication constraints on these edge devices may preclude their participation in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Gwen Legate , Irina Rish , Eugene Belilovsky

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss within a fixed parameter-space radius neighborhood. SAM and its variants mainly rely on a first-order linearized surrogate, while flat minima are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jinping Wang , Qinhan Liu , Zhiwu Xie , Zhiqiang Gao

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has recently emerged as an effective technique for improving DNN robustness to input variations. However, its interplay with the compactness requirements of on-device DNN deployments remains less explored.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Jialuo He , Huangxun Chen

By driving models to converge to flat minima, sharpness-aware learning algorithms (such as SAM) have shown the power to achieve state-of-the-art performances. However, these algorithms will generally incur one extra forward-backward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Yang Zhao , Hao Zhang , Xiuyuan Hu

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

The challenge of overfitting, in which the model memorizes the training data and fails to generalize to test data, has become increasingly significant in the training of large neural networks. To tackle this challenge, Sharpness-Aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zixiang Chen , Junkai Zhang , Yiwen Kou , Xiangning Chen , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Quanquan Gu

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Sihwan Park , Jihun Yun , SungYub Kim , Souvik Kundu , Eunho Yang

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) methods have gained increasing popularity by formulating the problem of minimizing both loss value and loss sharpness as a minimax objective. In this work, we increase the efficiency of the maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Gonçalo Mordido , Pranshu Malviya , Aristide Baratin , Sarath Chandar