Inference-Native Zeroth-Order Optimization for LLMs

arXiv:2605.28760 · cs.LG · Submitted 2026-05-27 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-05-27

Updated: 2026-09-27

Comments: 14 pages, including references and appendix

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Fine-Tuning — 26× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Accuracy — 9× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstraction — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Edge Deployment — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Resource Constraints — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• LoRA Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Quantization — 1× in this paper · explained in 12 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Verifier — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Fine-Tuning Language Models with Just Forward Passes

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