Related papers: Zero Order Stochastic Weakly Convex Composite Opti…
This work presents the first projection-free algorithm to solve stochastic bi-level optimization problems, where the objective function depends on the solution of another stochastic optimization problem. The proposed $\textbf{S}$tochastic…
We consider the problem of finding critical points of functions that are non-convex and non-smooth. Studying a fairly broad class of such problems, we analyze the behavior of three gradient-based methods (gradient descent, proximal update,…
We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given quantum access to a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension…
Min-max problems have broad applications in machine learning, including learning with non-decomposable loss and learning with robustness to data distribution. Convex-concave min-max problem is an active topic of research with efficient…
We study zeroth-order optimization for convex functions where we further assume that function evaluations are unavailable. Instead, one only has access to a $\textit{comparison oracle}$, which given two points $x$ and $y$ returns a single…
We consider a distributed convex optimization problem in a network which is time-varying and not always strongly connected. The local cost function of each node is affected by some stochastic process. All nodes of the network collaborate to…
Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…
We propose new sequential simulation-optimization algorithms for general convex optimization via simulation problems with high-dimensional discrete decision space. The performance of each choice of discrete decision variables is evaluated…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
In this paper, we consider a stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem with the cost function being distributed over $n$ agents having access only to zeroth-order (ZO) information of the cost. This problem has various machine…
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…
This review presents modern gradient-free methods to solve convex optimization problems. By gradient-free methods, we mean those that use only (noisy) realizations of the objective value. We are motivated by various applications where…
Zeroth-order (derivative-free) optimization attracts a lot of attention in machine learning, because explicit gradient calculations may be computationally expensive or infeasible. To handle large scale problems both in volume and dimension,…
In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…
We consider stochastic variational inequality problems where the mapping is monotone over a compact convex set. We present two robust variants of stochastic extragradient algorithms for solving such problems. Of these, the first scheme…
We study alternating first-order algorithms with no inner loops for solving nonconvex-strongly-concave min-max problems. We show the convergence of the alternating gradient descent--ascent algorithm method by proposing a substantially…
Vector optimization problems are a generalization of multiobjective optimization in which the preference order is related to an arbitrary closed and convex cone, rather than the nonnegative octant. Due to its real life applications, it is…
This paper deals with convex nonsmooth optimization problems. We introduce a general smooth approximation framework for the original function and apply random (accelerated) coordinate descent methods for minimizing the corresponding smooth…
In a real Hilbert space setting, we study the convergence properties of an inexact gradient algorithm featuring both viscous and Hessian driven damping for convex differentiable optimization. In this algorithm, the gradient evaluation can…
We introduce a generic scheme to solve nonconvex optimization problems using gradient-based algorithms originally designed for minimizing convex functions. Even though these methods may originally require convexity to operate, the proposed…