arXiv:2601.04710cs.CLcs.LG2026-01

用智能筛选取代随机扰动,让低内存微调更快更准

Steering the Noise: Turning Random Perturbations into Effective Descent for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

  • 从候选扰动中选最优或组合成引导向量,替代盲目随机扰动
  • 在OPT-13B上比所有零阶基线快,9项任务超越梯度方法
  • 适合资源受限场景下高效微调大模型,兼容现有优化器

微调大语言模型性能强但受反向传播内存开销限制。零阶(ZO)优化通过仅前向传播估计梯度避免此问题,但因高维参数空间中随机高斯扰动导致梯度估计方差大,收敛慢。本文提出一种即插即用框架,将随机扰动转化为更有效的下降方向:从少量候选扰动中评估损失,选择或组合与目标对齐者。提出两种实现:MeZO-GV利用低损与高损扰动组的对比形成引导向量;MeZO-Greedy在固定评估预算内保留最优单个扰动。理论证明二者每步目标函数下降更大,收敛更快。实验表明,该方法可自然集成至现有ZO优化器,在不同规模和架构的LLM上均提升收敛速度与任务准确率。在OPT-13B上,跨11个基准优于所有ZO基线,9项任务超越基于梯度的方法,同时保持前向仅优化的内存效率。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization avoids this overhead by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, yet it typically converges slowly because random Gaussian perturbations yield high-variance gradient estimates in high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework that turns random perturbations into more effective descent directions. The key idea is to draw a small pool of candidate perturbations, evaluate their loss values, and then select or combine those that are best aligned with the optimization objective. We develop two instantiations of this idea: MeZO-GV, which forms a guiding vector from the contrast between low-loss and high-loss perturbation groups, and MeZO-Greedy, which keeps the single best perturbation within a fixed evaluation budget. We theoretically show that both strategies yield a larger per-step reduction in the objective than standard ZO estimation, leading to improved convergence rates. Experiments on LLMs of different scales and architectures confirm that the proposed methods integrate naturally with existing ZO optimizers and consistently improve convergence speed and task accuracy. On OPT-13B, our approach outperforms all ZO baselines across 11 benchmarks and exceeds gradient-based methods on 9 of them, while retaining the memory efficiency of forward-only optimization.

大模型微调零阶优化内存效率扰动筛选

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