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Related papers: ZO-AdaMM: Zeroth-Order Adaptive Momentum Method fo…

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Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular optimization tool for the composite and constrained problems in machine learning. However, in many machine learning problems such as black-box attacks and bandit feedback, ADMM…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-31 Feihu Huang , Shangqian Gao , Songcan Chen , Heng Huang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yao Shu , Qixin Zhang , Kun He , Zhongxiang Dai

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 the paper, we propose a class of accelerated zeroth-order and first-order momentum methods for both nonconvex mini-optimization and minimax-optimization. Specifically, we propose a new accelerated zeroth-order momentum (Acc-ZOM) method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-19 Feihu Huang , Shangqian Gao , Jian Pei , Heng Huang

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Ruiyang Jin , Yuke Zhou , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Siyang Gao

Robust machine learning is currently one of the most prominent topics which could potentially help shaping a future of advanced AI platforms that not only perform well in average cases but also in worst cases or adverse situations. Despite…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Pu Zhao , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Nghia Hoang , Kaidi Xu , Bhavya Kailkhura , Xue Lin

In this paper, we design and analyze a new zeroth-order online algorithm, namely, the zeroth-order online alternating direction method of multipliers (ZOO-ADMM), which enjoys dual advantages of being gradient-free operation and employing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-20 Sijia Liu , Jie Chen , Pin-Yu Chen , Alfred O. Hero

Training deep neural networks is challenging. To accelerate training and enhance performance, we propose PadamP, a novel optimization algorithm. PadamP is derived by applying the adaptive estimation of the p-th power of the second-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-14 Yongqi Li , Xiaowei Zhang

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-22 Zichong Li , Pin-Yu Chen , Sijia Liu , Songtao Lu , Yangyang Xu

We investigate the effectiveness of adaptive zeroth-order (ZO) optimization for memory-constrained fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Contrary to prior claims, we show that adaptive ZO methods such as ZO-Adam offer no convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Hassan Dbouk , Nidham Gazagnadou , Matthias Reisser , Christos Louizos

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Wanli Shi , Hongchang Gao , Bin Gu

Lowering the memory requirement in full-parameter training on large models has become a hot research area. MeZO fine-tunes the large language models (LLMs) by just forward passes in a zeroth-order SGD optimizer (ZO-SGD), demonstrating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Shuoran Jiang , Qingcai Chen , Youchen Pan , Yang Xiang , Yukang Lin , Xiangping Wu , Chuanyi Liu , Xiaobao Song

Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Marco Rando , Cesare Molinari , Lorenzo Rosasco , Silvia Villa

In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-22 Pranay Sharma , Kaidi Xu , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xue Lin , Pramod K. Varshney

In this paper, we design and analyze a new family of adaptive subgradient methods for solving an important class of weakly convex (possibly nonsmooth) stochastic optimization problems. Adaptive methods that use exponential moving averages…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-26 Parvin Nazari , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , George Michailidis

Many important machine learning applications amount to solving minimax optimization problems, and in many cases there is no access to the gradient information, but only the function values. In this paper, we focus on such a gradient-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang , H. Vincent Poor

In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Aleksandr Lobanov , Nail Bashirov , Alexander Gasnikov

Fine-tuning LLMs is necessary for various dedicated downstream tasks, but classic backpropagation-based fine-tuning methods require substantial GPU memory. To this end, a recent work, MeZO, which relies solely on forward passes to fine-tune…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Zhijie Cai , Haolong Chen , Guangxu Zhu

In this letter, we first propose a \underline{Z}eroth-\underline{O}rder c\underline{O}ordinate \underline{M}ethod~(ZOOM) to solve the stochastic optimization problem over a decentralized network with only zeroth-order~(ZO) oracle feedback…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Shengjun Zhang , Tan Shen , Hongwei Sun , Yunlong Dong , Dong Xie , Heng Zhang

Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples in state-of-the-art image classifiers trained by deep neural networks (DNN) can be easily generated when the target model is transparent to an attacker, known as the white-box setting.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-02-03 Chun-Chen Tu , Paishun Ting , Pin-Yu Chen , Sijia Liu , Huan Zhang , Jinfeng Yi , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Shin-Ming Cheng
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