Modern pretrained vision models achieve strong accuracy but demand substantial GPU memory for fine-tuning, making edge deployment impractical. This paper compares five parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods (Full FT, LoRA, AdaLoRA, QLoRA, BitFit) on Transformers- (ViT-Small, TinyViT) and Mamba-based vision backbones (Vim-Small, MambaVision-T) under an on-device VRAM budget (e.
arXiv:2608. 08961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI training's rising resource intensity is straining electricity supplies and carbon budgets, motivating systematic study of memory-efficient training on constrained hardware.
AI training's rising resource intensity is straining electricity supplies and carbon budgets, motivating systematic study of memory-efficient training on constrained hardware. We benchmark five gradient optimizers (SGD, Adam, Adagrad, Adadelta, and Conjugate Gradient Descent) under three memory strategies (standard training, gradient checkpointing, and gradient accumulation) across four transformer architectures (ViT, ModernBERT, Llama 3.
FORGE is a forward‑only test‑time adaptation technique designed for integer‑only vision models running on microcontrollers. It restores batch‑normalization statistics after BN folding by re‑normalizing each convolution’s per‑channel output using only forward‑pass estimates, enabling adaptation on deployed, folded integer models. The method achieves accuracy gains comparable to gradient‑based TENT, requires adapting only a few layers, works with single‑sample streaming, and has been validated on an ESP32‑S3 with minimal energy and latency overhead.
arXiv:2604. 15622v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Always-on contextual AI runs language-aligned vision foundation models (VFMs) on edge devices, where the on-device model is the dominant continuous compute cost under strict latency and power limits.
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.
arXiv:2606. 11576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains.
arXiv:2603. 12478v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal instruction tuning is often compute-inefficient because training budgets are spread across large mixed image-video pools whose utility is highly uneven.
The paper introduces Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax‑free recurrent vision backbone that replaces global softmax attention with gated linear attention, alternating scan directions, and enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a DINOv3 teacher using only final‑layer patch‑token alignment, and achieves strong performance on COCO object detection (58.9 box AP) with very low latency (1.908 ms on an RTX 4090). The backbone also transfers to multiple dense prediction tasks and runs efficiently on edge hardware via a specialized CUDA operator and TensorRT deployment.
arXiv:2602. 20114v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine unlearning (MU) refers to the post-training capability to remove (the influence of) training examples that are incorrect, biased, or leak sensitive/private information.
The paper introduces TACO, a new optimizer for fine‑tuning large language models that drastically reduces optimizer state memory while preserving first‑order gradients. TACO selects the sign of the largest magnitude entry in each column of weight matrices, achieving a 174× reduction in persistent optimizer memory compared to AdamW8bit and a 2.9× decrease in peak training memory on OPT‑13B. This allows full‑parameter fine‑tuning of 30–32B‑parameter models on a single 80 GB GPU across multiple model families and tasks, with comparable accuracy and runtime to existing methods.
arXiv:2606. 08123v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model selection for safety-relevant visual recognition is often based on clean aggregate performance, although robustness, transfer, embedded latency, and explanation faithfulness may produce different preferences.
arXiv:2607. 14568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A companion study ran a 35B mixture-of-experts model on a 2011 NVIDIA Tesla C2075 (Fermi, sm_20, 6GB) as a GPU-prefill/CPU-decode hybrid, because the 4-bit model did not fit in device memory (arXiv:2606.