Jia Li

StructZO: Structured Zeroth-Order Optimization for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning large language models at scale is increasingly limited by the memory cost of backpropagation. Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimizers reduce this burden by relying only on forward function evaluations, but they still exhibit a substantial performance gap to first-order (FO) optimizers such as Adam. We argue that this...