arXiv:2606. 18650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) datasets scale to trillions of tokens, data selection has emerged as a critical frontier to filter out uninformative noise and construct adaptive learning trajectories.
By Jiaxing Wang, Deping Xiang, Jin Xu, Zirui Liu, Zicheng Zhang, Guoqiang Gong, Jun Fang, Chao Liu, Pengzhang Liu, Tongxuan Liu, Ke Zhang, Qixia Jiang
Sample-Adaptive Zeroth-Order Optimization (SAZO) is a memory‑efficient fine‑tuning method for large language models that learns sample importance online and allocates queries adaptively. It estimates importance using gradient‑norm information from directional differences and tracks evolving importance with per‑example exponential moving averages, requiring only O(N) additional scalar state. SAZO provably matches the leading convergence term of a minimum‑variance sampling oracle and achieves faster convergence than standard methods, with experiments showing up to 6× faster convergence to the same training loss.
By Haiyuan Wan, Yanyi Li, Weicheng Lin, Cong Fang
arXiv:2606. 18307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing the training data distribution for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) dictates the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Zefan Wang, Lincheng Li, Tianyu Yu, Yuan Yao
arXiv:2606. 02857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a memory-efficient alternative to backpropagation for fine-tuning large language models, but its deployment is limited by the high variance of gradient estimation.
By Liyan Tan, Yequan Zhao, Yifan Yang, Ruijie Zhang, Xinling Yu, Zheng Zhang
arXiv:2601. 04710v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation.
By Feihu Jin, Shipeng Cen, Ying Tan
arXiv:2604. 16197v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data attribution and valuation are critical for understanding data-model synergy for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing gradient-based methods suffer from scalability challenges on LLMs.
By Yide Ran, Jianwen Xie, Minghui Wang, Wenjin Zheng, Denghui Zhang, Chuan Li, Zhaozhuo Xu
arXiv:2606. 05165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training Data Attribution (TDA) seeks to trace a model's predictions back to its training data.
By Rishit Dagli, Abir Harrasse, Luke Zhang, Florent Draye, Amirali Abdullah, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Zhijing Jin
arXiv:2607. 01125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables fine-tuning large language models when backpropagation is unavailable or memory-prohibitive, but existing methods often perturb full model weights or randomly constructed low-dimensional subspaces, yielding high-variance estimates and limited performance.
By Xun Dong, Yibo Xu, Naigang Wang, Xin Li, Penghang Yin, Zi Yang
arXiv:2609.37842v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Influence functions estimate how individual training examples affect the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Analyzing how training data influe...
By Jaeseung Heo, J Rosser, Dongwoo Kim
The paper introduces ZFO, a lightweight framework that separates direction selection from step-size determination in large‑scale neural network optimization. ZFO uses a trusted first‑order optimizer to pick a search direction and then performs only two additional objective evaluations to build a local curvature‑aware model, selecting an adaptive step within a bounded interval. The authors provide theoretical guarantees for reliable curvature estimation, near‑optimal step selection, and convergence to a stationary point, and demonstrate that ZFO improves optimization and final performance over fixed‑step first‑order baselines on language‑model fine‑tuning tasks.
By Cristian McGee, El Houcine Bergou, Aritra Dutta
arXiv:2606. 05516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables memory-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) using only forward passes, but it remains unclear how useful adaptation is distributed across layers.
By Wanhao Yu, Ziyan Wang, Zheng Wang, Abeer Matar Almalky, Yihang Zuo, Shuteng Niu, Sen Lin, Adnan Siraj Rakin, Deliang Fan, Li Yang
arXiv:2502. 10239v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) across distributed data sources while preserving data privacy.
By Mohamed Aboelenien Ahmed, Kilian Pfeiffer, Ramin Khalili, Heba Khdr, J\"org Henkel