arXiv Machine Learning

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.

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
Jul 14

Memory Savings at What Cost? A Study of Alternatives to Backpropagation

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 Machine Learning
1d ago

SubZero+: Efficient Zeroth-Order LLM Fine-Tuning via Large Learning Rates

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
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Sparsity-Aware Low-Rank Representation for Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

arXiv:2601. 16991v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting large pre-trained language models to downstream tasks often entails fine-tuning millions of parameters or deploying costly dense weight updates, which hinders their use in resource-constrained environments.

By Longteng Zhang, Sen Wu, Shuai Hou, Zhengyu Qing, Zhuo Zheng, Danning Ke, Qihong Lin, Qiang Wang, Shaohuai Shi, Xiaowen Chu