English

Stochastic Non-Smooth Non-Convex Optimization with Decision-Dependent Distributions

Optimization and Control 2026-05-08 v1

Abstract

We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an explicit convergence guarantee for finding a (δ,ϵ)(\delta,\epsilon)-Goldstein stationary point with stochastic zeroth-order oracle (SZO) complexity of O(d2δ3ϵ3)\mathcal{O}(d^2\delta^{-3}\epsilon^{-3}). In addition, we show that the above complexity can be achieved with single SZO feedback per iteration. We further extend the analysis to smooth and Hessian-Lipschitz objectives, obtaining complexities O(d2ϵ6)\mathcal{O}(d^2\epsilon^{-6}) and O(d2ϵ9/2)\mathcal{O}(d^2\epsilon^{-9/2}), respectively. In the Hessian-Lipschitz case, this improves the best-known dependence on ϵ\epsilon for decision-dependent zeroth-order methods by a factor of ϵ1/2\epsilon^{-1/2}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.06549,
  title  = {Stochastic Non-Smooth Non-Convex Optimization with Decision-Dependent Distributions},
  author = {Chengchang Liu and Zongqi Wan and Haishan Ye and John C. S. Lui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.06549},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:55:34.711Z