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Variance-reduced Zeroth-Order Methods for Fine-Tuning Language Models
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Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has demonstrated success in a wide array of downstream tasks. However, as LMs are scaled up, the memory requirements for backpropagation become prohibitively high. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods can leverage memory-efficient forward passes to estimate gradients. More recently, MeZO, an adaptation of ZO-SGD, has been shown to consistently outperform zero-shot and in-context learning when combined with suitable task prompts. In this work, we couple ZO methods with variance reduction techniques to enhance stability and convergence for inference-based LM fine-tuning. We introduce Memory-Efficient Zeroth-Order Stochastic Variance-Reduced Gradient (MeZO-SVRG) and demonstrate its efficacy across multiple LM fine-tuning tasks, eliminating the reliance on task-specific prompts. Evaluated across a range of both masked and autoregressive LMs on benchmark GLUE tasks, MeZO-SVRG outperforms MeZO with up to 20% increase in test accuracies in both full- and partial-parameter fine-tuning settings. MeZO-SVRG benefits from reduced computation time as it often surpasses MeZO's peak test accuracy with a $2\times$ reduction in GPU-hours. MeZO-SVRG significantly reduces the required memory footprint compared to first-order SGD, i.e. by $2\times$ for autoregressive models. Our experiments highlight that MeZO-SVRG's memory savings progressively improve compared to SGD with larger batch sizes.
Forward citations
Cited by 5 Pith papers
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Accelerating Zeroth-Order Spectral Optimization with Partial Orthogonalization from Power Iteration
Partial orthogonalization from power iteration accelerates zeroth-order Muon by 1.5x-4x on LLM fine-tuning tasks while maintaining competitive accuracy.
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Accelerating Zeroth-Order Spectral Optimization with Partial Orthogonalization from Power Iteration
ZO-MOPI accelerates zeroth-order LLM fine-tuning by applying partial spectral orthogonalization from power iteration inside a momentum-projected subspace to reduce variance and exploit dominant directions.
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CR-Net: Scaling Parameter-Efficient Training with Cross-Layer Low-Rank Structure
CR-Net uses cross-layer low-rank residuals in a dual-path network plus specialized recomputation to outperform prior low-rank methods on 60M-7B model pre-training while using less compute and memory.
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Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning
AdaNAGED combines zeroth-order gradient-free training, automatic parameter adaptation, and LMO-based non-Euclidean geometry with claimed convergence guarantees, demonstrated on OPT-1.3B fine-tuning.
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Position: Zeroth-Order Optimization in Deep Learning Is Underexplored, Not Underpowered
Zeroth-order optimization is underexplored rather than underpowered in deep learning, with limitations stemming from full-space designs that can be addressed via subspace, spectral, and systems-aware approaches.
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