ChunkFT

ChunkFT: Memory-Efficient Full Fine-Tuning via Byte-Streamed Chunk Optimization

ChunkFT is a fine-tuning framework that reformulates full-parameter optimization around a dynamically activated working set of sub-tensors, enabling gradient computation without dense gradient materialization. It achieves full-parameter fine-tuning of a 7B model in 13.72GB GPU memory on a single RTX 4090, and scales Llama 3-70B fine-tuning to 2×H800 GPUs. Downstream evaluations on language understanding, math reasoning, and MT-Bench show ChunkFT matches or exceeds full-parameter fine-tuning quality while outperforming existing memory-efficient baselines such as LoRA-class methods. A theoretical convergence analysis in the deterministic setting is also provided.