Related papers: Stochastic Zeroth-order Optimization via Variance …
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…
We introduce and analyze Structured Stochastic Zeroth order Descent (S-SZD), a finite difference approach that approximates a stochastic gradient on a set of $l\leq d$ orthogonal directions, where $d$ is the dimension of the ambient space.…
This paper investigates projection-free algorithms for stochastic constrained multi-level optimization. In this context, the objective function is a nested composition of several smooth functions, and the decision set is closed and convex.…
Minimizing finite sums of functions is a central problem in optimization, arising in numerous practical applications. Such problems are commonly addressed using first-order optimization methods. However, these procedures cannot be used in…
Rank-based zeroth-order (ZO) optimization -- which relies only on the ordering of function evaluations -- offers strong robustness to noise and monotone transformations, and underlies many successful algorithms such as CMA-ES, natural…
Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied…
In this paper, we consider derivative free optimization problems, where the objective function is smooth but is computed with some amount of noise, the function evaluations are expensive and no derivative information is available. We are…
Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…
We consider the problem of training machine learning models on distributed data in a decentralized way. For finite-sum problems, fast single-machine algorithms for large datasets rely on stochastic updates combined with variance reduction.…
This work concerns the evolutionary approaches to distributed stochastic black-box optimization, in which each worker can individually solve an approximation of the problem with nature-inspired algorithms. We propose a distributed evolution…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…
We consider the optimization problem of the form $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x) \triangleq \mathbb{E}_{\xi} [F(x; \xi)]$, where the component $F(x;\xi)$ is $L$-mean-squared Lipschitz but possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. The recently…
Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are batch methods designed mainly based on the convex optimization, say, the…
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…
This paper is devoted to the study of stochastic optimization problems under the generalized smoothness assumption. By considering the unbiased gradient oracle in Stochastic Gradient Descent, we provide strategies to achieve in bounds the…
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…
This paper studies stochastic minimization of a finite-sum loss $ F (\mathbf{x}) = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{\xi=1}^N f(\mathbf{x};\xi) $. In many real-world scenarios, the Hessian matrix of such objectives exhibits a low-rank structure on a batch…
The Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm has recently regained popularity for machine learning applications due to its projection-free property and its ability to handle structured constraints. However, in the stochastic learning setting, it…
We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function for which derivatives are unavailable, and a convex, nonsmooth function with easy-to-evaluate proximal operator. Of particular focus is the case where the smooth…