arXiv AI

ZOIF: Zeroth-Order Influence Function Estimation for LLM Data Selection Using Only Forward Passes

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

BLADE: Scalable Bi-level Adaptive Data Selection for LLM Training

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

Sample-Adaptive Zeroth-Order Post-Training

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 Machine Learning
Jul 2

ZO-Act: Efficient Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning via One-Shot Activation-Informed Low-Rank Subspaces

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 Machine Learning
Oct 3

Trust the Direction, Search the Step: Zero-and-First-Order Methods for LLM Fine-Tuning

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 Machine Learning
Jun 5

Dominant-Layer ZO: A Single Layer Dominates Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of LLMs

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