In plain words: Instead of updating every weight at once, it updates one block of weights at a time, cutting memory needs so big models fit on cheap consumer GPUs. It cost just 2.6% of standard full training on RTX 4090 cards, with equal or better accuracy.
Abstract · Exploiting Block Coordinate Descent for Cost-Effective LLM Model Training
Training large language models typically demands extensive GPU memory and substantial financial investment, which poses a barrier for many small- to medium-sized teams. In this paper, we propose a full-parameter pre-training and fine-tuning framework based on block coordinate descent (BCD), enhanced with engineering optimizations, to enable efficient training of large-scale models on cost-effective RTX 4090, A100 and A800 GPU clusters. Under identical hardware configurations, we reduce the training cost of a 7B model to 33% on A100/A800 and only 2.6% on RTX 4090, compared to standard full-parameter training. It also enables large models previously restricted to A100 clusters to be trained on RTX 4090 without degrading performance. BCD achieves comparable or better accuracy than full-parameter and fine-tuning methods at most cases, with lower GPU consumption and improved hardware utilization.
Zeyu Liu, Yan Li, Yunquan Zhang, Boyang Zhang, Guoyong Jiang, Xin Zhang, Limin Xiao, Weifeng Zhang, Daning Cheng
arXiv:2506.12037 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted May 23, 2025 · updated Sep 26, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · We have revised certain details of the manuscript and incorporated new experimental