Related papers: Zeroth-Order Stochastic Variance Reduction for Non…
This paper studies the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem over a network of agents, where agents only access stochastic zeroth-order information about their local cost functions and collaboratively optimize the global…
The minimax excess risk optimization (MERO) problem is a new variation of the traditional distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem, which achieves uniformly low regret across all test distributions under suitable conditions. In…
Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization is pivotal for scenarios where backpropagation is unavailable, such as memory-constrained on-device learning and black-box optimization. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: they are either…
Variance reduction (VR) methods for finite-sum minimization typically require the knowledge of problem-dependent constants that are often unknown and difficult to estimate. To address this, we use ideas from adaptive gradient methods to…
This paper proposes a distributed stochastic algorithm with variance reduction for general smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization, which has wide applications in signal processing and machine learning communities. In distributed setting,…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
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…
In the learning to learn (L2L) framework, we cast the design of optimization algorithms as a machine learning problem and use deep neural networks to learn the update rules. In this paper, we extend the L2L framework to zeroth-order (ZO)…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…
We provide the first generalization error analysis for black-box learning through derivative-free optimization. Under the assumption of a Lipschitz and smooth unknown loss, we consider the Zeroth-order Stochastic Search (ZoSS) algorithm,…
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…
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…
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of nonsmooth and convex functions. Such problems often arise in typical machine learning problems as empirical risk minimization, but are computationally…
This paper explores the performance of a random Gaussian smoothing zeroth-order (ZO) scheme for minimising quasar-convex (QC) and strongly quasar-convex (SQC) functions in both unconstrained and constrained settings. For the unconstrained…
We analyze convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures for non-smooth convex optimization problems. By combining randomized smoothing techniques with accelerated gradient methods, we obtain convergence rates of stochastic…
Single-point zeroth-order optimization (SZO) is useful in solving online black-box optimization and control problems in time-varying environments, as it queries the function value only once at each time step. However, the vanilla SZO method…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has long been favored for its biological plausibility and its capacity to handle non-differentiable objectives, yet its computational complexity has historically limited its application in deep neural…
We develop two novel stochastic variance-reduction methods to approximate solutions of a class of nonmonotone [generalized] equations. Our algorithms leverage a new combination of ideas from the forward-reflected-backward splitting method…