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The aim of this paper and associated presentation is to put forward derivative-free optimization methods for control design. The important element, still ignored at the end of 2011 in systems and control (i.e. this element has apparently…
The predictive quality of machine learning models is typically measured in terms of their (approximate) expected prediction error or the so-called Area Under the Curve (AUC) for a particular data distribution. However, when the models are…
In this paper we consider stochastic weakly convex composite problems, however without the existence of a stochastic subgradient oracle. We present a derivative free algorithm that uses a two point approximation for computing a gradient…
We develop an algorithm for parameter-free stochastic convex optimization (SCO) whose rate of convergence is only a double-logarithmic factor larger than the optimal rate for the corresponding known-parameter setting. In contrast, the best…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely-used approach to learn models that are robust against distribution shift. Compared with the standard optimization setting, the objective function in DRO is more difficult to optimize,…
In this paper, we study consensus-based optimization (CBO), which is a multi-agent metaheuristic derivative-free optimization method that can globally minimize nonconvex nonsmooth functions and is amenable to theoretical analysis. Based on…
Decentralized optimization algorithms have received much attention due to the recent advances in network information processing. However, conventional decentralized algorithms based on projected gradient descent are incapable of handling…
Continuous DR-submodular functions are a class of functions that satisfy the Diminishing Returns (DR) property, which implies that they are concave along non-negative directions. Existing works have studied monotone continuous DR-submodular…
This paper presents a subgradient-based algorithm for constrained nonsmooth convex optimization that does not require projections onto the feasible set. While the well-established Frank-Wolfe algorithm and its variants already avoid…
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…
We introduce a new projection-free (Frank-Wolfe) method for optimizing structured nonconvex functions that are expressed as a difference of two convex functions. This problem class subsumes smooth nonconvex minimization, positioning our…
In this work, we propose a heuristic based open source solver for finding global solution to constrained derivative-free optimization (DFO) problems. Our solver named Global optimization using Surrogates for Derivative-free Optimization…
The study of first-order optimization algorithms (FOA) typically starts with assumptions on the objective functions, most commonly smoothness and strong convexity. These metrics are used to tune the hyperparameters of FOA. We introduce a…
This work presents the first projection-free algorithm to solve stochastic bi-level optimization problems, where the objective function depends on the solution of another stochastic optimization problem. The proposed $\textbf{S}$tochastic…
We present approximation theories and efficient training methods for derivative-informed Fourier neural operators (DIFNOs) with applications to PDE-constrained optimization. A DIFNO is an FNO trained by minimizing its prediction error…
We consider Decision-Focused Federated Learning (DFFL), a predict-then-optimize setting in which multiple clients collaboratively train predictive models for downstream linear optimization problems without exchanging raw data. Besides the…
In this paper, we revisit model-free policy search on an important robust control benchmark, namely $\mu$-synthesis. In the general output-feedback setting, there do not exist convex formulations for this problem, and hence global…
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…
An adaptive regularization algorithm for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is presented in which the objective function is never evaluated, but only derivatives are used. This algorithm belongs to the class of adaptive regularization…
Decision-focused learning (DFL) is an increasingly popular paradigm for training predictive models whose outputs are used in decision-making tasks. Instead of merely optimizing for predictive accuracy, DFL trains models to directly minimize…