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