Related papers: Log Barriers for Safe Non-convex Black-box Optimiz…
For safety-critical black-box optimization tasks, observations of the constraints and the objective are often noisy and available only for the feasible points. We propose an approach based on log barriers to find a local solution of a…
We address the problem of minimizing a convex smooth function $f(x)$ over a compact polyhedral set $D$ given a stochastic zeroth-order constraint feedback model. This problem arises in safety-critical machine learning applications, such as…
We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function for which derivatives are unavailable, and a convex, nonsmooth function with easy-to-evaluate proximal operator. Of particular focus is the case where the smooth…
This paper is devoted to the study (common in many applications) of the black-box optimization problem, where the black-box represents a gradient-free oracle $\tilde{f} = f(x) + \xi$ providing the objective function value with some…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
Optimizing noisy functions online, when evaluating the objective requires experiments on a deployed system, is a crucial task arising in manufacturing, robotics and many others. Often, constraints on safe inputs are unknown ahead of time,…
We study the problem of black-box optimization of a function f of any dimension, given function evaluations perturbed by noise. The function is assumed to be locally smooth around one of its global optima, but this smoothness is unknown.…
This paper is devoted to the study of the solution of a stochastic convex black box optimization problem. Where the black box problem means that the gradient-free oracle only returns the value of objective function, not its gradient. We…
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…
We consider the problem of minimizing a smooth, Lipschitz, convex function over a compact, convex set using sub-zeroth-order oracles: an oracle that outputs the sign of the directional derivative for a given point and a given direction, an…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…
We characterize the complexity of minimizing $\max_{i\in[N]} f_i(x)$ for convex, Lipschitz functions $f_1,\ldots, f_N$. For non-smooth functions, existing methods require $O(N\epsilon^{-2})$ queries to a first-order oracle to compute an…
We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…
We derive lower bounds on the black-box oracle complexity of large-scale smooth convex minimization problems, with emphasis on minimizing smooth (with Holder continuous, with a given exponent and constant, gradient) convex functions over…
Single-objective black box optimization (also known as zeroth-order optimization) is the process of minimizing a scalar objective $f(x)$, given evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we consider multi-objective…
We consider robust discrete minimization problems where uncertainty is defined by a convex set in the objective. We show how an integrality gap verifier for the linear programming relaxation of the non-robust version of the problem can be…
In this paper, the problem of safe global maximization (it should not be confused with robust optimization) of expensive noisy black-box functions satisfying the Lipschitz condition is considered. The notion "safe" means that the objective…
We investigate the convergence properties of a class of iterative algorithms designed to minimize a potentially non-smooth and noisy objective function, which may be algebraically intractable and whose values may be obtained as the output…
An adaptive regularization algorithm using inexact function and derivatives evaluations is proposed for the solution of composite nonsmooth nonconvex optimization. It is shown that this algorithm needs at most…