Related papers: Information-Theoretic Lower Bounds for Zero-Order …
Finding the global minimum of non-convex functions is one of the main and most difficult problems in modern optimization. In the first part of the paper, we consider a certain class of "good" non-convex functions that can be bounded above…
First order methods endowed with global convergence guarantees operate using global lower bounds on the objective. The tightening of the bounds has been shown to increase both the theoretical guarantees and the practical performance. In…
We present a generic framework for trading off fidelity and cost in computing stochastic gradients when the costs of acquiring stochastic gradients of different quality are not known a priori. We consider a mini-batch oracle that…
In this paper, we consider gradient methods for minimizing smooth convex functions, which employ the information obtained at the previous iterations in order to accelerate the convergence towards the optimal solution. This information is…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
We address the problem of learning an unknown smooth function and its derivatives from noisy pointwise evaluations under the supremum norm. While classical nonparametric regression provides a strong theoretical foundation, traditional…
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…
In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…
In this paper, we analyze the accuracy of gradient estimates obtained by linear interpolation when the underlying function is subject to bounded measurement noise. The total gradient error is decomposed into a deterministic component…
We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only available at a…
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…
The study of adaptive data analysis examines how many statistical queries can be answered accurately using a fixed dataset while avoiding false discoveries (statistically inaccurate answers). In this paper, we tackle a question that…
We analyze the properties of gradient descent on convex surrogates for the zero-one loss for the agnostic learning of linear halfspaces. If $\mathsf{OPT}$ is the best classification error achieved by a halfspace, by appealing to the notion…
This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…
Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…
The minimization of convex functions which are only available through partial and noisy information is a key methodological problem in many disciplines. In this paper we consider convex optimization with noisy zero-th order information,…
We construct a zeroth-order gradient estimator for a smooth function defined on the probability simplex. The proposed estimator queries the simplex only. We prove that projected gradient descent and the exponential weights algorithm, when…
Analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants typically relies on the assumption of uniformly bounded variance, a condition that frequently fails in practical non-convex settings, such as neural network training, as well as…
We propose an extragradient method with stepsizes bounded away from zero for stochastic variational inequalities requiring only pseudo-monotonicity. We provide convergence and complexity analysis, allowing for an unbounded feasible set,…
In this paper, we study nonconvex constrained stochastic zeroth-order optimization problems, for which we have access to exact information of constraints and noisy function values of the objective. We propose a Bregman linearized augmented…