ZO-Offloading: Fine-Tuning LLMs with 100 Billion Parameters on a Single GPU

Fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs typically requires a vast amount of GPU memory. Standard first-order optimizers like SGD face a significant challenge due to the large memory overhead from back-propagation as the size of LLMs increases, which necessitates caching activations during the forward pass and gradients during the backward pass. In contrast, zeroth-order (ZO) methods can estimate gradients with only two forward passes and without the need for activation caching. Additionally, CPU resources can be aggregated and offloaded to extend the memory and computational capacity of a single GPU. To enable efficient fine-tuning of LLMs on a single GPU, we introduce ZO-Offloading, a framework that strategically utilizes both CPU and GPU resources for ZO. ZO-Offloading dynamically offloads model parameters to the CPU and retrieves them to the GPU as needed, ensuring continuous and efficient computation by reducing idle times and maximizing GPU utilization. Parameter updates are integrated with ZO's dual forward passes to minimize redundant data transfers, thereby improving the overall efficiency of the fine-tuning process. With ZO-Offloading, for the first time, it becomes possible to fine-tune extremely large models, such as the OPT-175B with over 175 billion parameters, on a single GPU with just 24GB of memory—a feat previously unattainable with conventional methods. Moreover, our framework operates without any additional time cost compared to standard ZO methodologies.