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We exploit analogies between first-order algorithms for constrained optimization and non-smooth dynamical systems to design a new class of accelerated first-order algorithms for constrained optimization. Unlike Frank-Wolfe or projected…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-02 Michael Muehlebach , Michael I. Jordan

We study online learning with bandit feedback (i.e. learner has access to only zeroth-order oracle) where cost/reward functions $\f_t$ admit a "pseudo-1d" structure, i.e. $\f_t(\w) = \loss_t(\pred_t(\w))$ where the output of $\pred_t$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Aadirupa Saha , Nagarajan Natarajan , Praneeth Netrapalli , Prateek Jain

We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-10-27 Guanghui Lan

We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-07-01 Qihang Lin , Xi Chen , Javier Pena

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

The problem of stochastic convex optimization with bandit feedback (in the learning community) or without knowledge of gradients (in the optimization community) has received much attention in recent years, in the form of algorithms and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-04-30 Ohad Shamir

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Michael Muehlebach , Niao He

For certain sensing matrices, the Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm efficiently reconstructs undersampled signals. However, in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), where Fourier coefficients of a natural image are sampled with…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-08 Charles Millard , Aaron T Hess , Boris Mailhé , Jared Tanner

We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-01-17 Xiao Zhang , Lingxiao Wang , Quanquan Gu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-18 Aleksandr Lobanov

Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Qinzi Zhang , Ashok Cutkosky

We investigate accelerated zeroth-order algorithms for smooth composite convex optimization problems. While for unconstrained optimization, existing methods that merge 2-point zeroth-order gradient estimators with first-order frameworks…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-15 Silan Zhang , Yujie Tang

We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Tehila Dahan , Kfir Y. Levy

Composition optimization is widely-applied in nonconvex machine learning. Various advanced stochastic algorithms that adopt momentum and variance reduction techniques have been developed for composition optimization. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou

We consider an online stochastic game with risk-averse agents whose goal is to learn optimal decisions that minimize the risk of incurring significantly high costs. Specifically, we use the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as a risk measure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Zifan Wang , Yi Shen , Michael M. Zavlanos

This paper studies the convergence properties the well-known message-passing algorithm for convex optimisation. Under the assumption of pairwise separability and scaled diagonal dominance, asymptotic convergence is established and a simple…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-10 Zhaorong Zhang , Minyue Fu

We investigate the stochastic optimization problem of minimizing population risk, where the loss defining the risk is assumed to be weakly convex. Compositions of Lipschitz convex functions with smooth maps are the primary examples of such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-19 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy

We study stochastic optimization algorithms for constrained nonconvex stochastic optimization problems with Markovian data. In particular, we focus on the case when the transition kernel of the Markov chain is state-dependent. Such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-10 Abhishek Roy , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Saeed Ghadimi

We present a derivative-based algorithm for nonlinearly constrained optimization problems that is tolerant of inaccuracies in the data. The algorithm solves a semi-smooth set of nonlinear equations that are equivalent to the first-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-09-21 Jason E. Hicken , Pengfei Meng , Alp Dener

Statistical machine learning models trained with stochastic gradient algorithms are increasingly being deployed in critical scientific applications. However, computing the stochastic gradient in several such applications is highly expensive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-16 Yanhao Jin , Tesi Xiao , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian