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

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Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Yet traditional first-order optimizers such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adam incur prohibitive memory and computational…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open…

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

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

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has demonstrated remarkable promise in efficient fine-tuning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs). In particular, recent advances incorporate the low-rankness of gradients, introducing low-rank ZO estimators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Yan Sun , Tiansheng Huang , Liang Ding , Li Shen , Dacheng Tao

Deep learning models, despite their impressive achievements, suffer from high computational costs and memory requirements, limiting their usability in resource-constrained environments. Sparse neural networks significantly alleviate these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jie Ji , Gen Li , Kaiyuan Deng , Fatemeh Afghah , Xiaolong Ma

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent across diverse applications. However, their enormous size limits storage and processing capabilities to a few well-resourced stakeholders. As a result, most applications rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Mohammadsajad Alipour , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) poses significant memory challenges, as the back-propagation process demands extensive resources, especially with growing model sizes. Recent work, MeZO, addresses this issue using a zeroth-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Huaqin Zhao , Jiaxi Li , Yi Pan , Shizhe Liang , Xiaofeng Yang , Wei Liu , Xiang Li , Fei Dou , Tianming Liu , Jin Lu

Fine-tuning LLMs is necessary for various dedicated downstream tasks, but classic backpropagation-based fine-tuning methods require substantial GPU memory. To this end, a recent work, MeZO, which relies solely on forward passes to fine-tune…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Zhijie Cai , Haolong Chen , Guangxu Zhu

On-device fine-tuning is a critical capability for edge AI systems, which must support adaptation to different agentic tasks under stringent memory constraints. Conventional backpropagation (BP)-based training requires storing layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Prabodh Katti , Houssem Sifaou , Sangwoo Park , Bipin Rajendran , Osvaldo Simeone

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Ningfeng Yang , Tor M. Aamodt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Keisuke Sugiura , Hiroki Matsutani

Fine-tuning LLMs is both computationally and memory-intensive. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as QLoRA and DoRA, reduce the number of trainable parameters and lower memory usage, they do not decrease computational cost.…

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

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a subset of gradient-free optimization that emerges in many signal processing and machine learning applications. It is used for solving optimization problems similarly to gradient-based methods. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Bhavya Kailkhura , Gaoyuan Zhang , Alfred Hero , Pramod K. Varshney

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

Federated fine-tuning offers a promising approach for tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices while preserving data privacy. However, fine-tuning these models on edge devices remains challenging due to high memory,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Mohamed Aboelenien Ahmed , Kilian Pfeiffer , Ramin Khalili , Heba Khdr , Jörg Henkel

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) but demand massive GPU resources for training. Lowering the threshold for LLMs training would encourage greater participation from researchers, benefiting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Kai Lv , Yuqing Yang , Tengxiao Liu , Qinghui Gao , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu

We consider the problem of accurate sparse fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), that is, fine-tuning pretrained LLMs on specialized tasks, while inducing sparsity in their weights. On the accuracy side, we observe that standard…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Eldar Kurtic , Denis Kuznedelev , Elias Frantar , Michael Goin , Dan Alistarh