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Related papers: CurvZO: Adaptive Curvature-Guided Sparse Zeroth-Or…

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Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using standard first-order (FO) optimization often drives training toward sharp, poorly generalizing minima. Conversely, zeroth-order (ZO) methods offer stronger exploratory behavior without relying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Feihu Jin , Ying Tan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Lejs Deen Behric , Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Zhendong Mi , Qitao Tan , Grace Li Zhang , Zhaozhuo Xu , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

We introduce LOREN, a curvature-aware zeroth-order (ZO) optimization method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). Existing ZO methods, which estimate gradients via finite differences using random perturbations, often suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Hyunseok Seung , Jaewoo Lee , Hyunsuk Ko

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs under strict memory constraints, as it avoids the prohibitive memory cost of storing activations for backpropagation. However, existing ZO methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Wei Lin , Yining Jiang , Qingyu Song , Qiao Xiang , Hong Xu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order optimization (ZO) offers a memory-efficient alternative to gradient-based methods but suffers from slower convergence and unstable optimization due to noisy gradient estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Jikai Long , Zijian Hu , Xiaodong Yu , Jianwen Xie , Zhaozhuo Xu

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has yielded success on diverse downstream tasks, but as LMs grow in size, backpropagation requires a prohibitively large amount of memory. Zeroth-order (ZO) methods can in principle estimate gradients using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Sadhika Malladi , Tianyu Gao , Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee , Danqi Chen , Sanjeev Arora

Fine-tuning large pre-trained LLMs generally demands extensive GPU memory. Traditional first-order optimizers like SGD encounter substantial difficulties due to increased memory requirements from storing activations and gradients during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Liangyu Wang , Jie Ren , Hang Xu , Junxiao Wang , Huanyi Xie , David E. Keyes , Di Wang

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces memory costs when adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream applications. However, traditional first-order (FO) fine-tuning algorithms incur substantial memory overhead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Yiming Chen , Yuan Zhang , Liyuan Cao , Kun Yuan , Zaiwen Wen

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has demonstrated success in a wide array of downstream tasks. However, as LMs are scaled up, the memory requirements for backpropagation become prohibitively high. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Tanmay Gautam , Youngsuk Park , Hao Zhou , Parameswaran Raman , Wooseok Ha

Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning demands significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zhen Zhang , Yifan Yang , Kai Zhen , Nathan Susanj , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Siegfried Kunzmann , Zheng Zhang

Lowering the memory requirement in full-parameter training on large models has become a hot research area. MeZO fine-tunes the large language models (LLMs) by just forward passes in a zeroth-order SGD optimizer (ZO-SGD), demonstrating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Shuoran Jiang , Qingcai Chen , Youchen Pan , Yang Xiang , Yukang Lin , Xiangping Wu , Chuanyi Liu , Xiaobao Song

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become increasingly popular and important in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), especially on edge devices due to its ability to adjust the model to local data without the need for memory-intensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jiahe Chen , Ziye Ma

Zeroth-Order optimization presents a promising memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models by relying solely on forward passes. However, its practical adoption is severely constrained by slow wall-clock convergence and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Fei Wang , Li Shen , Liang Ding , Chao Xue , Ye Liu , Changxing Ding

Large Language Models (LLMs) are currently pre-trained and fine-tuned on large cloud servers. The next frontier is LLM personalization, where a foundation model can be fine-tuned with user/task-specific data. Given the sensitive nature of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Lei Gao , Amir Ziashahabi , Yue Niu , Salman Avestimehr , Murali Annavaram

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order methods like back-propagation is computationally intensive. Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimisation uses function evaluations instead of gradients, reducing memory usage, but suffers from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Alessio Galatolo , Zhenbang Dai , Katie Winkle , Meriem Beloucif

The widespread practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data faces two major challenges in memory and privacy. First, as the size of LLMs continues to grow, the memory demands of gradient-based training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Niao He

Interest in stochastic zeroth-order (SZO) methods has recently been revived in black-box optimization scenarios such as adversarial black-box attacks to deep neural networks. SZO methods only require the ability to evaluate the objective…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Mayumi Ohta , Nathaniel Berger , Artem Sokolov , Stefan Riezler

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on many NLP tasks, but fine-tuning them on resource-constrained mobile devices is challenging due to high memory and computation costs, despite growing demands for privacy-preserving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 He Sun , Jinrui Zhou , Li Li , Mingjun Xiao

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a gradient-free alternative to first-order (FO) methods by estimating gradients via finite differences of function evaluations, and has recently emerged as a memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yicheng Lang , Changsheng Wang , Yihua Zhang , Mingyi Hong , Zheng Zhang , Wotao Yin , Sijia Liu