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: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: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: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:2601. 18699v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities.
By Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundstrom-Imanov
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:2608. 14563v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forward-Pass-Only MLP training (FPO) adapts large language models without a backward pass through the model body, achieving 2.
By Rivaan Patil, Simon Dennis, Hao Guo, Kevin Shabahang
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: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
arXiv:2606. 26620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for decomposing superposed language model representations into sparse and interpretable features.
By XinYang He, Wei Wang, Bing Zhao, Xuan Ren, WenBo Li, WeiXu Qiao, Hu Wei, Lin Qu
arXiv:2606. 17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models.
By Da Chang, Ganzhao Yuan