Related papers: Improved Zeroth-Order Variance Reduced Algorithms …

Stochastic zeroth-order (SZO), or gradient-free, optimization allows to optimize arbitrary functions by relying only on function evaluations under parameter perturbations, however, the iteration complexity of SZO methods suffers a factor…

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…

Interest in stochastic zeroth-order (SZO) methods has recently been revived in black-box optimization scenarios such as adversarial black-box attacks to deep neural networks. SZO methods only require the ability to evaluate the objective…

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization is pivotal for scenarios where backpropagation is unavailable, such as memory-constrained on-device learning and black-box optimization. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: they are either…

We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

Provably solving stochastic convex optimization problems with constraints is essential for various problems in science, business, and statistics. Recently proposed XOR-Stochastic Gradient Descent (XOR-SGD) provides a convergence rate…

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…

SPIDER (Stochastic Path Integrated Differential EstimatoR) is an efficient gradient estimation technique developed for non-convex stochastic optimization. Although having been shown to attain nearly optimal computational complexity bounds,…

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…

First-order stochastic methods for solving large-scale non-convex optimization problems are widely used in many big-data applications, e.g. training deep neural networks as well as other complex and potentially non-convex machine learning…

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.…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…

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 work we address the problem of convex optimization in a multi-agent setting where the objective is to minimize the mean of local cost functions whose derivatives are not available (e.g. black-box models). Moreover agents can only…

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…

This paper studies the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem over a network of agents, where agents only access stochastic zeroth-order information about their local cost functions and collaboratively optimize the global…

Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…

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…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success across various NLP tasks, but the substantial memory overhead during backpropagation remains a critical bottleneck, especially as model scales grow. Zeroth-order (ZO)…