Related papers: Learning Dynamics of Zeroth-Order Optimization: A …
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…
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…
Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO) provides powerful tools for optimizing functions where explicit gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. However, the underlying mechanisms of popular ZOO methods, particularly those employing…
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is a popular class of techniques that strive to adapt large models in a scalable and resource-efficient manner. Yet, the mechanisms underlying their training performance and generalization remain…
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 enables large-language-model fine-tuning without storing backpropagation activations, while LoRA supplies compact trainable adapters. Combining them creates a rank paradox: increasing LoRA rank improves…
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…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often faces GPU memory bottlenecks: the backward pass of first-order optimizers like Adam increases memory usage to more than 10 times the inference level (e.g., 633 GB for OPT-30B). Zeroth-order…
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…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is indispensable for complex non-convex tasks where explicit gradients are computationally prohibitive or strictly inaccessible. For deploying ZO methods over distributed heterogeneous networks, the gradient…
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 revisit the one-point feedback zeroth-order (ZO) optimization problem, a classical setting in derivative-free optimization where only a single noisy function evaluation is available per query. Compared to their two-point counterparts,…
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable strong multimodal reasoning but incur heavy inference costs from redundant visual tokens. Token pruning alleviates this issue, yet existing approaches face limitations. Attention-based methods rely…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, learning from finite differences of function evaluations without backpropagation, has recently regained attention in deep learning due to its memory efficiency and applicability to gray- or black-box…
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…
Hard-thresholding is an important type of algorithm in machine learning that is used to solve $\ell_0$ constrained optimization problems. However, the true gradient of the objective function can be difficult to access in certain scenarios,…
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…
The adaptive momentum method (AdaMM), which uses past gradients to update descent directions and learning rates simultaneously, has become one of the most popular first-order optimization methods for solving machine learning problems.…
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…
Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…