Related papers: Hessian-Aware Zeroth-Order Optimization for Black-…
In this paper, we develop zeroth-order algorithms with provably (nearly) optimal sample complexity for stochastic bilevel optimization, where only noisy function evaluations are available. We propose two distinct algorithms: the first is…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…
Neural text ranking models have witnessed significant advancement and are increasingly being deployed in practice. Unfortunately, they also inherit adversarial vulnerabilities of general neural models, which have been detected but remain…
This paper focuses on a multi-agent zeroth-order online optimization problem in a federated learning setting for target tracking. The agents only sense their current distances to their targets and aim to maintain a minimum safe distance…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…
We show that, for finite-sum minimization problems, incorporating partial second-order information of the objective function can dramatically improve the robustness to mini-batch size of variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, making…
Optimization plays a key role in machine learning. Recently, stochastic second-order methods have attracted much attention due to their low computational cost in each iteration. However, these algorithms might perform poorly especially if…
We present a second order algorithm, based on orthantwise directions, for solving optimization problems involving the sparsity enhancing $\ell_1$-norm. The main idea of our method consists in modifying the descent orthantwise directions by…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is widely used for solving black-box optimization and control problems. In particular, single-point ZO (SZO) is well-suited to online or dynamic problem settings due to its requirement of only a single…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, learning from finite differences of function evaluations without backpropagation, has recently regained attention in deep learning due to its memory efficiency and applicability to gray- or black-box…
Machine learning malware detectors are vulnerable to adversarial EXEmples, i.e., carefully-crafted Windows programs tailored to evade detection. Unlike other adversarial problems, attacks in this context must be functionality-preserving, a…
The adaptive momentum method (AdaMM), which uses past gradients to update descent directions and learning rates simultaneously, has become one of the most popular first-order optimization methods for solving machine learning problems.…
Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization plays an essential role in scenarios where gradient information is inaccessible or unaffordable, such as black-box systems and resource-constrained environments. While existing adaptive methods such…
The dual challenges of prohibitive communication overhead and the impracticality of gradient computation due to data privacy or black-box constraints in distributed systems motivate this work on communication-constrained gradient-free…
Optimization of convex functions under stochastic zeroth-order feedback has been a major and challenging question in online learning. In this work, we consider the problem of optimizing second-order smooth and strongly convex functions…
In this paper, we study the problem of constrained robust (min-max) optimization ina black-box setting, where the desired optimizer cannot access the gradients of the objective function but may query its values. We present a principled…
Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…
Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…
This paper studies the challenging black-box adversarial attack that aims to generate adversarial examples against a black-box model by only using output feedback of the model to input queries. Some previous methods improve the query…