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: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: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:2506. 11042v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a resource-efficient strategy for adapting Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) by learning a small number of task-specific updates $\Delta W$.
By Guangning Xu, Baoquan Zhang, Michael. K. Ng
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: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:2602. 05988v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) on web-scale datasets becomes fundamental for advancing general-purpose AI.
By Keith Ando Ogawa, Bruno Lopes Yamamoto, Lucas Lauton de Alcantara, Lucas Pellicer, Rosimeire Pereira Costa, Edson Bollis, Anna Helena Reali Costa, Artur Jordao
arXiv:2606. 17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models.
By Da Chang, Ganzhao Yuan
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. 15360v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has substantially reduced the hardware cost of adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) by decreasing the number of trainable parameters, recent studies have sought to further improve PEFT through parameter sharing.
By Mohammad Aref Jafari-Raddani, Morteza Mohajjel Kafshdooz
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:2607. 04033v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizer selection for large-scale model training has become a system-level design decision constrained jointly by compute, memory, tuning budget, and task diversity, yet the landscape of over one hundred methods remains fragmented.
By Siyuan Li, Jiabao Pan, Yumou Liu, Zhuoli Ouyang, Xin Jin, Xinglong Xu, Jingxuan Wei, Shengye Pang, Jintao Che, Xuanhe Zhou, Conghui He, Cheng Tan