Related papers: Stochastic Zeroth-order Optimization via Variance …
Stochastic variance reduction has proven effective at accelerating first-order algorithms for solving convex finite-sum optimization tasks such as empirical risk minimization. Incorporating second-order information has proven helpful in…
We consider the task of classification in the high dimensional setting where the number of features of the given data is significantly greater than the number of observations. To accomplish this task, we propose a heuristic, called sparse…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
Optimization methods are essential in solving complex problems across various domains. In this research paper, we introduce a novel optimization method called Gaussian Crunching Search (GCS). Inspired by the behaviour of particles in a…
Safe derivative-free optimization under unknown constraints is a fundamental challenge in modern learning and control. Existing zeroth-order (ZO) methods typically still assume access to a first-order oracle of the constraint functions or…
We propose a second-order (Hessian or Hessian-free) based optimization method for variational inference inspired by Gaussian backpropagation, and argue that quasi-Newton optimization can be developed as well. This is accomplished by…
In many real-world problems, first-order (FO) derivative evaluations are too expensive or even inaccessible. For solving these problems, zeroth-order (ZO) methods that only need function evaluations are often more efficient than FO methods…
We propose Zeroth-Order Random Matrix Search for Learning from Demonstrations (ZORMS-LfD). ZORMS-LfD enables the costs, constraints, and dynamics of constrained optimal control problems, in both continuous and discrete time, to be learned…
This paper presents a set of continuous-time distributed algorithms that solve unconstrained, separable, convex optimization problems over undirected networks with fixed topologies. The algorithms are developed using a Lyapunov function…
This paper deals with the black-box optimization problem. In this setup, we do not have access to the gradient of the objective function, therefore, we need to estimate it somehow. We propose a new type of approximation JAGUAR, that…
In this paper, we consider mixed-integer nonsmooth constrained optimization problems whose objective/constraint functions are available only as the output of a black-box zeroth-order oracle (i.e., an oracle that does not provide derivative…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
This paper considers stochastic convex optimization problems with two sets of constraints: (a) deterministic constraints on the domain of the optimization variable, which are difficult to project onto; and (b) deterministic or stochastic…
Randomized zeroth-order methods are classically analyzed in expectation, but a black-box Markov conversion can give misleading high-probability guarantees, in particular by forcing the finite-difference smoothing radius to shrink with the…
We study a standard distributed optimization framework where $N$ networked nodes collaboratively minimize the sum of their local convex costs. The main body of existing work considers the described problem when the underling network is…
We consider the zeroth-order optimization problem in the huge-scale setting, where the dimension of the problem is so large that performing even basic vector operations on the decision variables is infeasible. In this paper, we propose a…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
The low-rank stochastic semidefinite optimization has attracted rising attention due to its wide range of applications. The nonconvex reformulation based on the low-rank factorization, significantly improves the computational efficiency but…
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been extensively used for solving stochastic problems or large-scale machine learning problems. Recent works employ various techniques to improve the convergence rate of SGMs for both convex and…
The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…