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Federated learning enables collaborative model training across numerous edge devices without requiring participants to share data; however, memory and communication constraints on these edge devices may preclude their participation in…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has gained attention as a memory-efficient alternative to first-order (FO) methods, particularly in settings where gradient computation is expensive or even impractical. Beyond its memory efficiency, in this…
Two types of zeroth-order stochastic algorithms have recently been designed for nonconvex optimization respectively based on the first-order techniques SVRG and SARAH/SPIDER. This paper addresses several important issues that are still open…
Quantum Approximation Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a highly advocated variational algorithm for solving the combinatorial optimization problem. One critical feature in the quantum circuit of QAOA algorithm is that it consists of…
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…
Qubit-efficient optimization studies how large combinatorial problems can be addressed with quantum circuits whose width is far smaller than the number of logical variables. In quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), objective…
Distributed quantum computing (DQC) connects many small quantum processors into a single logical machine, offering a practical route to scalable quantum computation. However, most existing DQC paradigms are structure-agnostic. Circuit…
LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) is widely used for autonomous navigation, but its deployment on Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP)-constrained platforms remains challenging due to the computational cost of processing dense point clouds.…
Specialized edge accelerators rely on low-bit quantization, but vendor compilers differ in scaling, clipping, and kernel support, often as black boxes. The same floating-point (FP) checkpoint can therefore yield inconsistent accuracy across…
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…
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…
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…
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a method of approximately solving combinatorial optimization problems. While QAOA is developed to solve a broad class of combinatorial optimization problems, it is not clear which…
Quantum Annealing (QA) is a computational framework where a quantum system's continuous evolution is used to find the global minimum of an objective function over an unstructured search space. It can be seen as a general metaheuristic for…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…
Fine-tuning is powerful for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, but it often results in huge memory usages. A promising approach to mitigate this is using Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, which estimates gradients to replace…
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) -- one of the leading algorithms for applications on intermediate-scale quantum processors -- is designed to provide approximate solutions to combinatorial optimization problems with…
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…
The Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) modeling and solution framework is a requirement for quantum and digital annealers. However optimality for QUBO problems of any practical size is extremely difficult to achieve. In…
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…