Related papers: Universally Empowering Zeroth-Order Optimization v…

Vision-Language Continual Learning (VLCL) has attracted significant research attention for its robust capabilities, and the adoption of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies is enabling these models to achieve competitive…

Safe derivative-free optimization under unknown constraints is a fundamental challenge in modern learning and control. Existing zeroth-order (ZO) methods typically still assume access to a first-order oracle of the constraint functions or…

Federated learning (FL), as an emerging edge artificial intelligence paradigm, enables many edge devices to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their private data. To enhance the training efficiency of FL, various…

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…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has long been favored for its biological plausibility and its capacity to handle non-differentiable objectives, yet its computational complexity has historically limited its application in deep neural…

As the size of large language models grows exponentially, GPU memory has become a bottleneck for adapting these models to downstream tasks. In this paper, we aim to push the limits of memory-efficient training by minimizing memory usage on…

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…

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…

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…

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or…

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…

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…

LLM alignment remains a critical challenge. Inference-time methods provide a flexible alternative to fine-tuning, but their uniform computational effort often yields suboptimal alignment. We hypothesize that for many alignment tasks, the…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Training large language models (LLMs) encounters challenges in GPU memory consumption due to the high memory requirements of model states. The widely used Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) addresses this issue through strategic sharding but…

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…