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:2606. 14970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data.
By Dmitriy Bystrov, Daniil Medyakov, Dmitry Bylinkin, Aleksandr Beznosikov
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:2506. 21833v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Forward-mode automatic differentiation (FmAD) and zero-order (ZO) optimization are increasingly proposed as memory-efficient, backpropagation-free alternatives for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, yet their benefits are typically evaluated only against standard backpropagation (BP), omitting memory-efficient variants such as activation checkpointing.
By Kunjal Panchal, Sunav Choudhary, Yuriy Brun, Hui Guan
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:2606. 17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models.
By Da Chang, Ganzhao Yuan
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
arXiv:2502. 11034v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Loss spikes remain a persistent obstacle in large-scale language model pretraining.
By Guoxia Wang, Shuai Li, Congliang Chen, Jinle Zeng, Jiabin Yang, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Li Shen
arXiv:2608. 05541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evolution Strategy (ES) is a promising alternative to gradient-based fine-tuning for resource-constrained Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning.
By Yu Gu, Zhi Zheng, Yunpeng Ba, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Zhenkun Wang
arXiv:2608. 05783v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning has become a critical capability for safely removing specific, sensitive knowledge from large language models (LLMs).
By Pawe{\l} Batorski, Przemys{\l}aw Spurek, Paul Swoboda
arXiv:2604. 14669v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) methods are widely used when gradients are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, including black-box learning and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large models, yet their optimization dynamics in deep learning remain underexplored.
By Minhak Song, Liang Zhang, Bingcong Li, Niao He, Michael Muehlebach, Sewoong Oh
arXiv:2608. 15665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables backpropagation-free fine-tuning of large language models, but existing ZO methods suffer from high-variance gradient estimators, making convergence unstable and highly sensitive to learning rates.
By Ziming Yu, Shuyao Xiao, Xingyu Zhao, Sike Wang, Pan Zhou, Peiyu Zang, Xiangda Yan, Yongjie Yang, Jia Li