Related papers: A Derivative-Free CoMirror Algorithm
This paper presents an algorithm for approximately minimizing a convex function in simple, not necessarily bounded convex domains, assuming only that function values and subgradients are available. No global information about the objective…
We prove that the finite-difference based derivative-free descent (FD-DFD) methods have a capability to find the global minima for a class of multiple minima problems. Our main result shows that, for a class of multiple minima objectives…
We propose a new framework for black-box convex optimization which is well-suited for situations where gradient computations are expensive. We derive a new method for this framework which leverages several concepts from convex optimization,…
The Low Order-Value Optimization (LOVO) problem involves minimizing the minimum among a finite number of function values within a feasible set. LOVO has several practical applications such as robust parameter estimation, protein alignment,…
Distributed optimization has gained a surge of interest in recent years. In this paper we propose a distributed projection free algorithm named Distributed Conditional Gradient Sliding(DCGS). Compared to the state-of-the-art distributed…
Gaussian smoothing (GS) is a derivative-free optimization (DFO) algorithm that estimates the gradient of an objective using perturbations of the current parameters sampled from a standard normal distribution. We generalize it to sampling…
The field of derivative-free optimization (DFO) studies algorithms for nonlinear optimization that do not rely on the availability of gradient or Hessian information. It is primarily designed for settings when functions are black-box,…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is vital in solving complex optimization problems where only noisy function evaluations are available through an oracle. Within this domain, DFO via finite difference (FD) approximation has emerged as a…
In a real Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$. Given any function $f$ convex differentiable whose solution set $\argmin_{\mathcal{H}}\,f$ is nonempty, by considering the Proximal Algorithm $x_{k+1}=\text{prox}_{\b_k f}(d x_k)$, where $0<d<1$ and…
We consider minimization of functions that are compositions of convex or prox-regular functions (possibly extended-valued) with smooth vector functions. A wide variety of important optimization problems fall into this framework. We describe…
The goal of this paper is to investigate an approach for derivative-free optimization that has not received sufficient attention in the literature and is yet one of the simplest to implement and parallelize. It consists of computing…
This paper addresses the study of derivative-free smooth optimization problems, where the gradient information on the objective function is unavailable. Two novel general derivative-free methods are proposed and developed for minimizing…
In this paper we introduce two conceptual algorithms for minimising abstract convex functions. Both algorithms rely on solving a proximal-type subproblem with an abstract Bregman distance based proximal term. We prove their convergence when…
In this paper, we propose and analyze algorithms for zeroth-order optimization of non-convex composite objectives, focusing on reducing the complexity dependence on dimensionality. This is achieved by exploiting the low dimensional…
Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…
This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…
Optimization problems under affine constraints appear in various areas of machine learning. We consider the task of minimizing a smooth strongly convex function F(x) under the affine constraint Kx=b, with an oracle providing evaluations of…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex objective which is the sum of a smooth part, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a nonsmooth part. Inspired by various applications, we focus on the case when the nonsmooth part is a…
In this paper, we showcase the interplay between discrete and continuous optimization in network-structured settings. We propose the first fully decentralized optimization method for a wide class of non-convex objective functions that…
Gradient-based methods are well-suited for derivative-free optimization (DFO), where finite-difference (FD) estimates are commonly used as gradient surrogates. Traditional stochastic approximation methods, such as Kiefer-Wolfowitz (KW) and…