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This paper studies stochastic minimization of a finite-sum loss $ F (\mathbf{x}) = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{\xi=1}^N f(\mathbf{x};\xi) $. In many real-world scenarios, the Hessian matrix of such objectives exhibits a low-rank structure on a batch…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-12 Yu Liu , Weibin Peng , Tianyu Wang , Jiajia Yu

This paper deals with stochastic optimization problems involving Markovian noise with a zero-order oracle. We present and analyze a novel derivative-free method for solving such problems in strongly convex smooth and non-smooth settings…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-06 Boris Prokhorov , Semyon Chebykin , Alexander Gasnikov , Aleksandr Beznosikov

This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Anik Kumar Paul , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Optimization of convex functions under stochastic zeroth-order feedback has been a major and challenging question in online learning. In this work, we consider the problem of optimizing second-order smooth and strongly convex functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Qian Yu , Yining Wang , Baihe Huang , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee

We develop a novel primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth and nonlinear compositional convex minimization problems, which covers many existing and brand-new models as special cases. Our approach relies on a combination of a new…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-20 Yuzixuan Zhu , Deyi Liu , Quoc Tran-Dinh

Classic zeroth-order optimization approaches typically optimize for a smoothed version of the original function, i.e., the expected objective under randomly perturbed model parameters. This can be interpreted as encouraging the loss values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Xuchen Gong , Tian Li

We consider non-smooth saddle point optimization problems. To solve these problems, we propose a zeroth-order method under bounded or Lipschitz continuous noise, possible adversarial. In contrast to the state-of-the-art algorithms, our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-28 Darina Dvinskikh , Vladislav Tominin , Yaroslav Tominin , Alexander Gasnikov

In this paper, we show how to transform any optimization problem that arises from fitting a machine learning model into one that (1) detects and removes contaminated data from the training set while (2) simultaneously fitting the trimmed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-07 Aleksandr Aravkin , Damek Davis

Iterative thresholding algorithms are well-suited for high-dimensional problems in sparse recovery and compressive sensing. The performance of this class of algorithms depends heavily on the tuning of certain threshold parameters. In…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-11-04 Ali Mousavi , Arian Maleki , Richard G. Baraniuk

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-06 Zhongruo Wang , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma , Meisam Razaviyayn

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-19 Youqing Hua , Shuai Liu , Yiguang Hong , Wei Ren

In this paper, we consider non-smooth convex optimization with a zeroth-order oracle corrupted by symmetric stochastic noise. Unlike the existing high-probability results requiring the noise to have bounded $\kappa$-th moment with $\kappa…

While many distributed optimization algorithms have been proposed for solving smooth or convex problems over the networks, few of them can handle non-convex and non-smooth problems. Based on a proximal primal-dual approach, this paper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-01 Zhiguo Wang , Jiawei Zhang , Tsung-Hui Chang , Jian Li , Zhi-Quan Luo

We propose a novel stochastic optimization algorithm called STOchastic Recursive Momentum for Compositional (STORM-Compositional) optimization that minimizes the composition of expectations of two stochastic functions, the latter being an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-09 Huizhuo Yuan , Wenqing Hu

In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysis Kalogerias

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a subset of gradient-free optimization that emerges in many signal processing and machine learning applications. It is used for solving optimization problems similarly to gradient-based methods. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Bhavya Kailkhura , Gaoyuan Zhang , Alfred Hero , Pramod K. Varshney

This paper considers the nonconvex nonsmooth problem in which the objective function is Lipschitz continuous. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access stochastic function value evaluations with heavy-tailed noise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

Zeroth-order optimization is a fundamental research topic that has been a focus of various learning tasks, such as black-box adversarial attacks, bandits, and reinforcement learning. However, in theory, most complexity results assert a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-03 Pengyun Yue , Long Yang , Cong Fang , Zhouchen Lin

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

In this study, we consider an optimization problem with uncertainty dependent on decision variables, which has recently attracted attention due to its importance in machine learning and pricing applications. In this problem, the gradient of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-31 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda