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Related papers: Stochastic Zeroth-order Optimization in High Dimen…

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Using double-smoothing technique and stochastic mirror descent with inexact oracle we built an optimal algorithm (up to a multiplicative factor) for two-points gradient-free non-smooth stochastic convex programming. We investigate how much…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-15 Anastasia Bayandina , Alexander Gasnikov , Fariman Guliev , Anastasia Lagunovskaya

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Michael Muehlebach , Niao He

In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysis Kalogerias

Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Daniel Golovin , John Karro , Greg Kochanski , Chansoo Lee , Xingyou Song , Qiuyi Zhang

We consider the minimization of submodular functions subject to ordering constraints. We show that this optimization problem can be cast as a convex optimization problem on a space of uni-dimensional measures, with ordering constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-31 Francis Bach

In this paper, we discuss application of iterative Stochastic Optimization routines to the problem of sparse signal recovery from noisy observation. Using Stochastic Mirror Descent algorithm as a building block, we develop a multistage…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-31 Anatoli Juditsky , Andrei Kulunchakov , Hlib Tsyntseus

This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Ziyi Chen , Peiran Yu , Heng Huang

This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Charles Audet , Jean Bigeon , Romain Couderc , Michael Kokkolaras

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-20 HanQin Cai , Daniel Mckenzie , Wotao Yin , Zhenliang Zhang

We present a novel gradient-free algorithm to solve a convex stochastic optimization problem, such as those encountered in medicine, physics, and machine learning (e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit problem), where the objective function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-22 Georgii Bychkov , Darina Dvinskikh , Anastasia Antsiferova , Alexander Gasnikov , Aleksandr Lobanov

In this paper, we analyze the mirror descent algorithm for non-smooth optimization problems in which the objective function is relatively strongly convex, without relying on the standard Lipschitz continuity assumption commonly used in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Mohammad S. Alkousa , Fedor S. Stonyakin

We consider a distributed convex optimization problem in a network which is time-varying and not always strongly connected. The local cost function of each node is affected by some stochastic process. All nodes of the network collaborate to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-27 Wenjie Li , Mohamad Assaad

Composite convex optimization models arise in several applications, and are especially prevalent in inverse problems with a sparsity inducing norm and in general convex optimization with simple constraints. The most widely used algorithms…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-07-15 Vahan Hovhannisyan , Panos Parpas , Stefanos Zafeiriou

In this paper, we consider lasso problems with zero-sum constraint, commonly required for the analysis of compositional data in high-dimensional spaces. A novel algorithm is proposed to solve these problems, combining a tailored active-set…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-26 Andrea Cristofari

In this paper, we introduce various mechanisms to obtain accelerated first-order stochastic optimization algorithms when the objective function is convex or strongly convex. Specifically, we extend the Catalyst approach originally designed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-10 Andrei Kulunchakov , Julien Mairal

Zeroth-order optimization addresses problems where gradient information is inaccessible or impractical to compute. While most existing methods rely on first-order approximations, incorporating second-order (curvature) information can, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Dongyoon Kim , Sungjae Lee , Wonjin Lee , Kwang In Kim

In this paper, we prove new complexity bounds for zeroth-order methods in non-convex optimization with inexact observations of the objective function values. We use the Gaussian smoothing approach of Nesterov and Spokoiny [2015] and extend…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-14 Innokentiy Shibaev , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-07-01 Qihang Lin , Xi Chen , Javier Pena

Composite convex optimization problems which include both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term have important applications in machine learning and signal processing, such as when one wishes to recover an unknown matrix that is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-28 Dan Garber , Atara Kaplan

We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Xinran Zheng , Tara Javidi , Behrouz Touri