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.
arXiv:2609.08277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study zeroth-order optimization of non-convex functions with the aid of directional hints, which are cheap but potentially inaccurate approximations...
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 22906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study adaptive gradient descent for continuously differentiable, possibly nonconvex objectives under one-sided H\"older regularity.
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.
arXiv:2409. 03682v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning new tasks by leveraging prior experience is a fundamental trait of intelligent systems.
arXiv:2609.38095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) dominates deep learning but imposes a massive memory tax. For example, training OPT-30B with Adam requires $\approx$ 600GB of GPU...
arXiv:2606. 01764v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We revisit the convergence guarantees of the Extragradient (EG) method for unconstrained biaffine min-max optimization.
arXiv:2606. 06722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The training of neural networks often entails objective functions that are not globally $L$-smooth.
arXiv:2606. 17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models.
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.