9 accepted papers
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved significant success in downstream tasks. However, as the model size continues to grow, traditional fine-tuning methods have become increasingly impractical due to their high computational and memory costs. This has motivated researchers to explor…
Large Scale Pre-Trained Language Models (PTMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks. Adapting such models to downstream tasks is computationally intensive and time-consuming, particularly in black-box scenarios common in Language-Model-as-a-…
Visual Prompt Learning (VPL) has emerged as a powerful strategy for harnessing the capabilities of large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) to tackle specific downstream tasks. However, the opaque nature of PTMs in many real-world applications has led to a growing interest in gradient-free approaches w…
Zeroth-order optimization algorithms are widely used for black-box optimization problems, such as those in machine learning and prompt engineering, where the gradients are approximated using function evaluations. Recently, a generalization result was provided for zeroth-order stochastic gradient des…
Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a competitive alternative for model-free reinforcement learning, showcasing exemplary performance in tasks like Mujoco and Atari. Notably, they shine in scenarios with imperfect reward functions, making them invaluable for real-world applications where dense…
On-device learning faces memory constraints when optimizing or fine-tuning on edge devices with limited resources. Current techniques for training deep models on edge devices rely heavily on backpropagation. However, its high memory usage calls for a reassessment of its dominance. In this paper, we…
Escaping from saddle points has become an important research topic in non-convex optimization. In this paper, we study the case when calculations of explicit gradients are expensive or even infeasible, and only function values are accessible. Currently, there have two types of gradient-free (zerot…
$\ell_0$ constrained optimization is prevalent in machine learning, particularly for high-dimensional problems, because it is a fundamental approach to achieve sparse learning. Hard-thresholding gradient descent is a dominant technique to solve this problem. However, first-order gradients of the obj…
We consider escaping saddle points of nonconvex problems where only the function evaluations can be accessed. Although a variety of works have been proposed, the majority of them require either second or first-order information, and only a few of them have exploited zeroth-order methods, particularl…