collaborators

9 papers

cs.CV2026

ZOMP: Zeroth-Order Multi-Modal Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

Sajjad Ghiasvand, Yifan Yang, Mahnoosh Alizadeh +1

Fine-tuning vision-language models such as CLIP typically requires backpropagation (BP) through the full model, which is infeasible when only forward-pass access is available, as i…

cs.LG2026

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

Yifan Yang, Zhen Zhang, Jiayi Tian +2

This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explo…

cs.LG2026

GRZO: Group-Relative Zeroth-Order Optimization for Large Language Model Fine-Tuning

Liyan Tan, Yequan Zhao, Yifan Yang +3

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a memory-efficient alternative to backpropagation for fine-tuning large language models, but its deployment is limited by the high variance of gra…

cs.CL2026

FLAT-LLM: Fine-grained Low-rank Activation Space Transformation for Large Language Model Compression

Jiayi Tian, Ryan Solgi, Jinming Lu +3

Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled remarkable progress in natural language processing, yet their high computational and memory demands pose challenges for deployment in reso…

cs.LG2025

SharpZO: Hybrid Sharpness-Aware Vision Language Model Prompt Tuning via Forward-Only Passes

Yifan Yang, Zhen Zhang, Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan +3

Fine-tuning vision language models (VLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various downstream tasks; yet, it requires access to model gradients through backpropagation (B…

cs.LG2025

Wanda++: Pruning Large Language Models via Regional Gradients

Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Bhavana Ganesh +11

Large Language Models (LLMs) pruning seeks to remove unimportant weights for inference speedup with minimal accuracy impact. However, existing methods often suffer from accuracy de…