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The problem we consider is a multi-objective optimization problem, in which the goal is to find an optimal value of a vector function representing various criteria. The aim of this work is to develop an algorithm which utilizes the trust…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Nataša Krejić , Nataša Krklec Jerinkić , Luka Rutešić

The stochastic proximal point (SPP) methods have gained recent attention for stochastic optimization, with strong convergence guarantees and superior robustness to the classic stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods showcased at little to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-10 Xiao-Tong Yuan , Ping Li

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) has emerged as a crucial method for robots to acquire new skills. However, when given suboptimal task trajectory demonstrations with shape characteristics reflecting human preferences but subpar dynamic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Chenlin Ming , Zitong Wang , Boxuan Zhang , Zhanxiang Cao , Xiaoming Duan , Jianping He

Two algorithms are proposed, analyzed, and tested for solving continuous optimization problems with nonlinear equality constraints. Each is an extension of a stochastic momentum-based method from the unconstrained setting to the setting of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Qi Wang , Christian Piermarini , Yunlang Zhu , Frank E. Curtis

Stochastic gradient methods with momentum are widely used in applications and at the core of optimization subroutines in many popular machine learning libraries. However, their sample complexities have not been obtained for problems beyond…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-12 Vien V. Mai , Mikael Johansson

In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is the dominant algorithm in many optimization scenarios, including convex optimization instances and non-convex neural network training. Yet, in the stochastic setting, momentum interferes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-28 Junhyung Lyle Kim , Panos Toulis , Anastasios Kyrillidis

Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Saber Salehkaleybar , Sadegh Khorasani , Negar Kiyavash , Niao He , Patrick Thiran

We present $\textit{Free-MESSAGE}^{p}$, the first zeroth-order algorithm for (weakly-)convex mean-semideviation-based risk-aware learning, which is also the first three-level zeroth-order compositional stochastic optimization algorithm…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-14 Dionysios S. Kalogerias , Warren B. Powell

This work proposes an accelerated first-order algorithm we call the Robust Momentum Method for optimizing smooth strongly convex functions. The algorithm has a single scalar parameter that can be tuned to trade off robustness to gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Saman Cyrus , Bin Hu , Bryan Van Scoy , Laurent Lessard

Using double-smoothing technique and stochastic mirror descent with inexact oracle we built an optimal algorithm (up to a multiplicative factor) for two-points gradient-free non-smooth stochastic convex programming. We investigate how much…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-15 Anastasia Bayandina , Alexander Gasnikov , Fariman Guliev , Anastasia Lagunovskaya

In this paper, we study a structured class of nonconvex constrained stochastic problems with difference-of-convex (DC) regularization, where the feasible set is possibly nonconvex and the concave part of the DC regularizer is allowed to be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Luxuan Li , Chunfeng Cui , Xiao Wang

In this paper, we consider a distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problem, which is about minimizing a sum of $n$ local cost functions over a network with only zeroth-order information. A novel single-loop Decentralized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Hongxu Chen , Jinchi Chen , Ke Wei

Zeroth-order (a.k.a, derivative-free) methods are a class of effective optimization methods for solving complex machine learning problems, where gradients of the objective functions are not available or computationally prohibitive.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-12 Feihu Huang , Shangqian Gao , Jian Pei , Heng Huang

In this paper, we propose a new accelerated stochastic first-order method called clipped-SSTM for smooth convex stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed distributed noise in stochastic gradients and derive the first high-probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-26 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , Alexander Gasnikov

We consider minimization of stochastic functionals that are compositions of a (potentially) non-smooth convex function $h$ and smooth function $c$ and, more generally, stochastic weakly-convex functionals. We develop a family of stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-25 John Duchi , Feng Ruan

We study differentially private (DP) optimization algorithms for stochastic and empirical objectives which are neither smooth nor convex, and propose methods that return a Goldstein-stationary point with sample complexity bounds that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Guy Kornowski , Daogao Liu , Kunal Talwar

In this paper, we propose a multilevel stochastic framework for the solution of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach uses random regularized first-order models that exploit an available hierarchical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-27 Filippo Marini , Margherita Porcelli , Elisa Riccietti

We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-17 Lihua Lei , Cheng Ju , Jianbo Chen , Michael I. Jordan

Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-03 Liu Liu , Minhao Cheng , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Dacheng Tao