Related papers: Why Zeroth-Order Adaptation May Forget Less: A Ran…
Reinforcement learning often requires extensive training data. Simulation-to-real transfer offers a promising approach to address this challenge in robotics. While differentiable simulators offer improved sample efficiency through exact…
Zeroth-order (ZO, also known as derivative-free) methods, which estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, have attracted much attention recently because of its broad applications in machine learning community. The two function…
Recent studies suggest that Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is inherently more resilient to catastrophic forgetting than Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, whether RFT (e.g., GRPO) can effectively overcome forgetting in challenging…
Fine-tuning vision language models (VLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various downstream tasks; yet, it requires access to model gradients through backpropagation (BP), making them unsuitable for memory-constrained,…
Zeroth-order methods have become important tools for solving problems where we have access only to function evaluations. However, the zeroth-order methods only using gradient approximations are $n$ times slower than classical first-order…
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…
Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization is pivotal for scenarios where backpropagation is unavailable, such as memory-constrained on-device learning and black-box optimization. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: they are either…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key driver of language model reasoning. Among RL algorithms, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is the de facto standard, avoiding the need for a critic by using per-prompt baselines and…
Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…
Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…
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.…
Catastrophic forgetting remains a central challenge in continual learning (CL) with pre-trained models. While existing approaches typically freeze the backbone and fine-tune a small number of parameters to mitigate forgetting, they still…
The zeroth-order optimization has been widely used in machine learning applications. However, the theoretical study of the zeroth-order optimization focus on the algorithms which approximate (first-order) gradients using (zeroth-order)…
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…
We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…
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…
The paper discusses derivative-free optimization (DFO), which involves minimizing a function without access to gradients or directional derivatives, only function evaluations. Classical DFO methods, which mimic gradient-based methods, such…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators…
Modern GPUs are equipped with large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, enabling them to support mini-batch sizes of up to tens of thousands of training samples. However, most existing optimizers struggle to perform effectively at such a…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with classic first-order optimizers entails prohibitive GPU memory due to the backpropagation process. Recent works have turned to zeroth-order optimizers for fine-tuning, which save substantial…