相关论文: Zeroth-Order Sharpness-Aware Learning with Exponen…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has recently emerged as a robust technique for improving the accuracy of deep neural networks. However, SAM incurs a high computational cost in practice, requiring up to twice as much computation as…
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…
Fine-tuning large pretrained language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of modern NLP, yet its growing memory demands (driven by backpropagation and large optimizer States) limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Zero-order (ZO)…
We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…
Exponential tilting is a technique commonly used in fields such as statistics, probability, information theory, and optimization to create parametric distribution shifts. Despite its prevalence in related fields, tilting has not seen…
Stochastic zeroth-order (SZO), or gradient-free, optimization allows to optimize arbitrary functions by relying only on function evaluations under parameter perturbations, however, the iteration complexity of SZO methods suffers a factor…
Safety alignment for large language models (LLMs) aims to reduce harmful or unsafe behavior while preserving general utility. However, recent findings reveal that alignment effects can be fragile: lightweight post-alignment manipulations,…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a recently proposed training method that seeks to find flat minima in deep learning, resulting in state-of-the-art performance across various domains. Instead of minimizing the loss of the current…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is vulnerable to real-world data corruption, with even robust algorithms failing under challenging observation and mixture corruptions. We posit this failure stems from data corruption creating sharp…
Sharpness is an almost generic assumption in continuous optimization that bounds the distance from minima by objective function suboptimality. It facilitates the acceleration of first-order methods through restarts. However, sharpness…
Zeroth-order optimization addresses problems where gradient information is inaccessible or impractical to compute. While most existing methods rely on first-order approximations, incorporating second-order (curvature) information can, in…
Adversarial Training (AT), which adversarially perturb the input samples during training, has been acknowledged as one of the most effective defenses against adversarial attacks, yet suffers from inevitably decreased clean accuracy. Instead…
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…
This work proposes a universal and adaptive second-order method for minimizing second-order smooth, convex functions. Our algorithm achieves $O(\sigma / \sqrt{T})$ convergence when the oracle feedback is stochastic with variance $\sigma^2$,…
We present SAM, a biologically-plausible selective attention-driven modulation approach to enhance classification models in a continual learning setting. Inspired by neurophysiological evidence that the primary visual cortex does not…
By driving models to converge to flat minima, sharpness-aware learning algorithms (such as SAM) have shown the power to achieve state-of-the-art performances. However, these algorithms will generally incur one extra forward-backward…
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…
We introduce a new zeroth-order algorithm for private stochastic optimization on nonconvex and nonsmooth objectives. Given a dataset of size $M$, our algorithm ensures $(\alpha,\alpha\rho^2/2)$-R\'enyi differential privacy and finds a…
Fine-tuning large pretrained language models on a limited training corpus usually suffers from poor generalization. Prior works show that the recently-proposed sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimization method can improve the model…