Related papers: Convergence of a first-order consensus-based globa…
We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…
In this work we survey some recent results on the global minimization of a non-convex and possibly non-smooth high dimensional objective function by means of particle based gradient-free methods. Such problems arise in many situations of…
This paper considers a consensus optimization problem, where all the nodes in a network, with access to the zeroth-order information of its local objective function only, attempt to cooperatively achieve a common minimizer of the sum of…
We present a novel method for convex unconstrained optimization that, without any modifications, ensures: (i) accelerated convergence rate for smooth objectives, (ii) standard convergence rate in the general (non-smooth) setting, and (iii)…
Bayesian optimisation (BO) is a well-known efficient algorithm for finding the global optimum of expensive, black-box functions. The current practical BO algorithms have regret bounds ranging from $\mathcal{O}(\frac{logN}{\sqrt{N}})$ to…
In this paper, we formally analyze global convergence in the realm of distributed consensus optimization. Current solutions have explored such analysis, particularly focusing on consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (CADMM),…
In this paper we theoretically show that interior-point methods based on self-concordant barriers possess favorable global complexity beyond their standard application area of convex optimization. To do that we propose first- and…
Nonconvex optimization problems arise in many areas of computational science and engineering and are (approximately) solved by a variety of algorithms. Existing algorithms usually only have local convergence or subsequence convergence of…
The study of first-order optimization algorithms (FOA) typically starts with assumptions on the objective functions, most commonly smoothness and strong convexity. These metrics are used to tune the hyperparameters of FOA. We introduce a…
This paper investigates how to accelerate the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on nonconvex problems with zeroth-order information available only. We propose a zeroth-order (ZO) distributed primal-dual stochastic…
Many recent studies on first-order methods (FOMs) focus on \emph{composite non-convex non-smooth} optimization with linear and/or nonlinear function constraints. Upper (or worst-case) complexity bounds have been established for these…
We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…
We address black-box convex optimization problems, where the objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be sampled within the feasible set. The challenge is thus to generate a sequence of feasible points converging…
Bayesian optimization (BO) has become popular for sequential optimization of black-box functions. When BO is used to optimize a target function, we often have access to previous evaluations of potentially related functions. This begs the…
A new universal derivative-free optimization method CDOS (Conjugate Direction with Orthogonal Shift) is proposed. The CDOS method was specially developed to solve optimization tasks where the objective function and constraints are black…
Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm employing a clipped surrogate objective (PPO-Clip) is a prominent exemplar of the policy optimization methods. However, despite its remarkable empirical success, PPO-Clip lacks theoretical…
We analyze online and mini-batch k-means variants. Both scale up the widely used Lloyd 's algorithm via stochastic approximation, and have become popular for large-scale clustering and unsupervised feature learning. We show, for the first…
This paper proposes a theoretical framework of the grey wolf optimizer (GWO) based on several interesting theoretical findings, involving sampling distribution, order-1 and order-2 stability, and global convergence analysis. In the part II…
In this paper we provide a rigorous convergence analysis for the renowned particle swarm optimization method by using tools from stochastic calculus and the analysis of partial differential equations. Based on a time-continuous formulation…
In this paper, we study the conditional stochastic optimization (CSO) problem which covers a variety of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference, etc. The sample-averaged gradient…