English
Related papers

Related papers: The Barycenter Method for Direct Optimization

200 papers

We study the complexity of approximating Wassertein barycenter of $m$ discrete measures, or histograms of size $n$ by contrasting two alternative approaches, both using entropic regularization. The first approach is based on the Iterative…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-21 Alexey Kroshnin , Darina Dvinskikh , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov , Nazarii Tupitsa , Cesar Uribe

We propose a Bayesian optimization algorithm for objective functions that are sums or integrals of expensive-to-evaluate functions, allowing noisy evaluations. These objective functions arise in multi-task Bayesian optimization for tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-26 Saul Toscano-Palmerin , Peter I. Frazier

In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-13 Aleksandr Beznosikov , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Alexander Gasnikov

We propose a new \cu{class-optimal} algorithm for the distributed computation of Wasserstein Barycenters over networks. Assuming that each node in a graph has a probability distribution, we prove that every node can reach the barycenter of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-24 César A. Uribe , Darina Dvinskikh , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov , Angelia Nedić

Computing Wasserstein barycenters (a.k.a. Optimal Transport barycenters) is a fundamental problem in geometry which has recently attracted considerable attention due to many applications in data science. While there exist polynomial-time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Jason M. Altschuler , Enric Boix-Adsera

In deterministic optimization, line searches are a standard tool ensuring stability and efficiency. Where only stochastic gradients are available, no direct equivalent has so far been formulated, because uncertain gradients do not allow for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-03 Maren Mahsereci , Philipp Hennig

In deterministic optimization, line searches are a standard tool ensuring stability and efficiency. Where only stochastic gradients are available, no direct equivalent has so far been formulated, because uncertain gradients do not allow for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-19 Maren Mahsereci , Philipp Hennig

In this work, we propose derivative-free framework for bilevel optimization. We consider both the upper and lower-level problems with bound constraints on the variables, as well as general nonlinear constraints, assuming that first-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-24 Edoardo Cesaroni , Giampaolo Liuzzi , Stefano Lucidi

Derivative Free Optimization is known to be an efficient and robust method to tackle the black-box optimization problem. When it comes to noisy functions, classical comparison-based algorithms are slower than gradient-based algorithms. For…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-04-29 Marie-Liesse Cauwet , Olivier Teytaud

Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Shaocong Ma , Heng Huang

We investigate barycenters of Gaussian process laws in adapted Wasserstein space. The adapted Wasserstein distance refines classical optimal transport by enforcing compatibility of transport plans with the temporal flow of information, and…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-27 Francesco Mattesini , Johannes Wiesel

Standard first-order stochastic optimization algorithms base their updates solely on the average mini-batch gradient, and it has been shown that tracking additional quantities such as the curvature can help de-sensitize common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Ricky T. Q. Chen , Dami Choi , Lukas Balles , David Duvenaud , Philipp Hennig

Multilevel optimization has gained renewed interest in machine learning due to its promise in applications such as hyperparameter tuning and continual learning. However, existing methods struggle with the inherent difficulty of efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yuntian Gu , Xuzheng Chen

We develop an algorithm that combines model-based and model-free methods for solving a nonlinear optimal control problem with a quadratic cost in which the system model is given by a linear state-space model with a small additive nonlinear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-23 Yansong Li , Shuo Han

We develop a class of barycenter problems based on mean field control problems in three dimensions with associated reactive-diffusion systems of unnormalized multi-species densities. This problem is the generalization of the Wasserstein…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-03 Arjun Vijaywargiya , Guosheng Fu , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Dravyansh Sharma

This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-27 Michael R. Metel , Akiko Takeda

Novel coordinate descent (CD) methods are proposed for minimizing nonconvex functions consisting of three terms: (i) a continuously differentiable term, (ii) a simple convex term, and (iii) a concave and continuous term. First, by extending…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-15 Qi Deng , Chenghao Lan

We consider non-smooth saddle point optimization problems. To solve these problems, we propose a zeroth-order method under bounded or Lipschitz continuous noise, possible adversarial. In contrast to the state-of-the-art algorithms, our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-28 Darina Dvinskikh , Vladislav Tominin , Yaroslav Tominin , Alexander Gasnikov

Direct search methods are mainly designed for use in problems with no equality constraints. However, there are many instances where the feasible set is of measure zero in the ambient space and no mesh point lies within it. There are methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-01-23 David W Dreisigmeyer