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Recently, flat minima are proven to be effective for improving generalization and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) achieves state-of-the-art performance. Yet the current definition of flatness discussed in SAM and its follow-ups are…

Comparison of fine-tuning models with reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) reveals that, despite similar performance at a new task, RL preserves prior knowledge and capabilities significantly better. We find that the…

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…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with zeroth-order (ZO) optimization reduces memory by approximating gradients through function evaluations. However, existing methods essentially perform updates in a one-dimensional space, and…

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…

Fine-tuning large pre-trained LLMs generally demands extensive GPU memory. Traditional first-order optimizers like SGD encounter substantial difficulties due to increased memory requirements from storing activations and gradients during…

Continual learning aims to avoid catastrophic forgetting and effectively leverage learned experiences to master new knowledge. Existing gradient projection approaches impose hard constraints on the optimization space for new tasks to…

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which can compromise their performance and accuracy. Adversarial Training (AT) has emerged as a popular approach for protecting neural networks against such attacks. However, a…

Comparison-Based Optimization (CBO) is an optimization paradigm that assumes only very limited access to the objective function f(x). Despite the growing relevance of CBO to real-world applications, this field has received little attention…

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…

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,…

Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…

Learned Optimizers (LOs), a type of Meta-learning, have gained traction due to their ability to be parameterized and trained for efficient optimization. Traditional gradient-based methods incorporate explicit regularization techniques such…

Online minimization of an unknown convex function over the interval $[0,1]$ is considered under first-order stochastic bandit feedback, which returns a random realization of the gradient of the function at each query point. Without knowing…

In the learning to learn (L2L) framework, we cast the design of optimization algorithms as a machine learning problem and use deep neural networks to learn the update rules. In this paper, we extend the L2L framework to zeroth-order (ZO)…

Transformers have shown strong ability to model long-term dependencies and are increasingly adopted as world models in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) under partial observability. However, unlike natural language corpora, RL…

In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order (FO) optimizers like SGD and Adam has become standard. Yet, as LLMs grow {in size}, the substantial memory…

Ensemble learning remains a cornerstone of machine learning, with stacking used to integrate predictions from multiple base learners through a meta-model. However, deep stacking remains uncommon due to feature redundancy, complexity, and…

Zeroth-order optimization is an important research topic in machine learning. In recent years, it has become a key tool in black-box adversarial attack to neural network based image classifiers. However, existing zeroth-order optimization…

Recent advances have reformulated diffusion models as deterministic ordinary differential equations (ODEs) through the framework of flow matching, providing a unified formulation for the noise-to-data generative process. Various…