Related papers: Why Zeroth-Order Adaptation May Forget Less: A Ran…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables dimension-free communication in federated learning (FL), making it attractive for fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) due to significant communication savings. However, existing ZO-FL methods…
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for a variety of downstream tasks. However, as LLMs grow in size, the memory demands for backpropagation become increasingly prohibitive. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods…
Zeroth-order optimizers have recently emerged as a practical approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing GPU memory consumption compared to traditional first-order methods. Yet, existing zeroth-order…
While fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks often yields impressive results, it comes at the cost of memory inefficiency due to back-propagation in gradient-based training. Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO)…
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…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is a memory-efficient strategy for fine-tuning Large Language Models using only forward passes. However, the application of ZO fine-tuning in memory-constrained settings such as mobile phones and laptops is…
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…
Classic zeroth-order optimization approaches typically optimize for a smoothed version of the original function, i.e., the expected objective under randomly perturbed model parameters. This can be interpreted as encouraging the loss values…
Federated optimization, an emerging paradigm which finds wide real-world applications such as federated learning, enables multiple clients (e.g., edge devices) to collaboratively optimize a global function. The clients do not share their…
Quantization has become a predominant approach for model compression, enabling deployment of large models trained on GPUs onto smaller form-factor devices for inference. Quantization-aware training (QAT) optimizes model parameters with…
Low-bit forward evaluation is an attractive route to memory-efficient zeroth-order (ZO) adaptation: the optimizer needs only scalar losses, and the model can be queried near deployment precision. The obstacle is that a quantized ZO query is…
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.…
This work identifies a simple pre-training mechanism that leads to representations exhibiting better continual and transfer learning. This mechanism -- the repeated resetting of weights in the last layer, which we nickname "zapping" -- was…
We conjecture that the inherent difference in generalisation between adaptive and non-adaptive gradient methods in deep learning stems from the increased estimation noise in the flattest directions of the true loss surface. We demonstrate…
Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to improve model robustness under distribution shifts by adapting to unlabeled test data, but most existing methods rely on backpropagation (BP), which is computationally costly and incompatible with…
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…
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…
Variance reduction techniques are designed to decrease the sampling variance, thereby accelerating convergence rates of first-order (FO) and zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods. However, in composite optimization problems, ZO methods…
The success of gradient descent in ML and especially for learning neural networks is remarkable and robust. In the context of how the brain learns, one aspect of gradient descent that appears biologically difficult to realize (if not…
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…