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In this paper, we analyze a derivative-free line search method designed for bound-constrained problems. Our analysis demonstrates that this method exhibits a worst-case complexity comparable to other derivative-free methods for…
The paper discusses derivative-free optimization (DFO), which involves minimizing a function without access to gradients or directional derivatives, only function evaluations. Classical DFO methods, which mimic gradient-based methods, such…
A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…
We propose a derivative-free trust-region method based on finite-difference gradient approximations for smooth optimization problems with convex constraints. The proposed method does not require computing an approximate stationarity…
Consider an $s$-dimensional function being evaluated at $n$ points of a low discrepancy sequence (LDS), where the objective is to approximate the one-dimensional functions that result from integrating out $(s-1)$ variables. Here, the…
An adaptive regularization algorithm using inexact function and derivatives evaluations is proposed for the solution of composite nonsmooth nonconvex optimization. It is shown that this algorithm needs at most…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…
In this paper we consider the unconstrained minimization problem of a smooth function in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. We design a novel randomized derivative-free algorithm --- the stochastic…
We consider a step search method for continuous optimization under a stochastic setting where the function values and gradients are available only through inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Unlike the stochastic gradient…
We consider the gradient (or steepest) descent method with exact line search applied to a strongly convex function with Lipschitz continuous gradient. We establish the exact worst-case rate of convergence of this scheme, and show that this…
The problem of steering a particular class of $n$-dimensional continuous-time dynamical systems towards the minima of a function without gradient information is considered. We propose an hybrid controller, implementing a discrete-time…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
We present a model-based derivative-free method for optimization subject to general convex constraints, which we assume are unrelaxable and accessed only through a projection operator that is cheap to evaluate. We prove global convergence…
We study the iteration complexity of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for minimizing the gradient norm of smooth, possibly nonconvex functions. We provide several results, implying that the $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ upper bound of…
Frequently, when dealing with many machine learning models, optimization problems appear to be challenging due to a limited understanding of the constructions and characterizations of the objective functions in these problems. Therefore,…
This paper considers the fixed point problem for a nonexpansive mapping on a real Hilbert space and proposes novel line search fixed point algorithms to accelerate the search. The termination conditions for the line search are based on the…
Finding approximate stationary points, i.e., points where the gradient is approximately zero, of non-convex but smooth objective functions $f$ over unrestricted $d$-dimensional domains is one of the most fundamental problems in classical…
In this work, we develop new insights into the fundamental problem of convexity testing of real-valued functions over the domain $[n]$. Specifically, we present a nonadaptive algorithm that, given inputs $\eps \in (0,1), s \in \mathbb{N}$,…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for the minimization of strictly convex quadratic functions. The framework is flexible and generic. At every iteration the search direction is a linear combination of the negative gradient, as…
We propose approximately exact line search (AELS), which uses only function evaluations to select a step size within a constant fraction of the exact line search minimizer of a unimodal objective. We bound the number of iterations and…