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There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Jinshan Zeng , Ke Ma , Yuan Yao

We present a novel gradient-free algorithm to solve a convex stochastic optimization problem, such as those encountered in medicine, physics, and machine learning (e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit problem), where the objective function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-22 Georgii Bychkov , Darina Dvinskikh , Anastasia Antsiferova , Alexander Gasnikov , Aleksandr Lobanov

This paper investigates projection-free algorithms for stochastic constrained multi-level optimization. In this context, the objective function is a nested composition of several smooth functions, and the decision set is closed and convex.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-07 Wei Jiang , Sifan Yang , Wenhao Yang , Yibo Wang , Yuanyu Wan , Lijun Zhang

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

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is indispensable for complex non-convex tasks where explicit gradients are computationally prohibitive or strictly inaccessible. For deploying ZO methods over distributed heterogeneous networks, the gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Yanxu Su , Xiaorui Tong , Changyin Sun

The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-28 Elad Hazan , Kfir Y. Levy , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Dongruo Zhou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Marco Rando , Cesare Molinari , Lorenzo Rosasco , Silvia Villa

We consider the problem of stochastic convex optimization under convex constraints. We analyze the behavior of a natural variance reduced proximal gradient (VRPG) algorithm for this problem. Our main result is a non-asymptotic guarantee for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-02 Koulik Khamaru

This paper considers the distributed convex-concave minimax optimization under the second-order similarity. We propose stochastic variance-reduced optimistic gradient sliding (SVOGS) method, which takes the advantage of the finite-sum…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-28 Qihao Zhou , Haishan Ye , Luo Luo

This paper aims at developing novel shuffling gradient-based methods for tackling two classes of minimax problems: nonconvex-linear and nonconvex-strongly concave settings. The first algorithm addresses the nonconvex-linear minimax model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-30 Quoc Tran-Dinh , Trang H. Tran , Lam M. Nguyen

Nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems broadly emerge in machine learning and business decision making, whereas two core challenges impede the development of efficient solution methods with finite-time convergence guarantee: the lack of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Tianyi Lin , Zeyu Zheng , Michael I. Jordan

This study explores the performance of the random Gaussian smoothing Zeroth-Order ExtraGradient (ZO-EG) scheme considering \Af{deterministic} min-max optimisation problems with possibly NonConvex-NonConcave (NC-NC) objective functions. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Amir Ali Farzin , Yuen Man Pun , Philipp Braun , Antoine Lesage-landry , Youssef Diouane , Iman Shames

Nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization has received intense attention over the last decade due to its broad applications in machine learning. Most existing algorithms rely on one-sided information, such as the convexity (resp. concavity)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Taoli Zheng , Linglingzhi Zhu , Anthony Man-Cho So , Jose Blanchet , Jiajin Li

Minimizing finite sums of functions is a central problem in optimization, arising in numerous practical applications. Such problems are commonly addressed using first-order optimization methods. However, these procedures cannot be used in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Marco Rando , Cheik Traoré , Cesare Molinari , Lorenzo Rosasco , Silvia Villa

This paper focuses on the problem of \emph{constrained} \emph{stochastic} optimization. A zeroth order Frank-Wolfe algorithm is proposed, which in addition to the projection-free nature of the vanilla Frank-Wolfe algorithm makes it gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-20 Anit Kumar Sahu , Manzil Zaheer , Soummya Kar

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

Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Elissa Mhanna , Mohamad Assaad

Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular optimization tool for the composite and constrained problems in machine learning. However, in many machine learning problems such as black-box attacks and bandit feedback, ADMM…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-31 Feihu Huang , Shangqian Gao , Songcan Chen , Heng Huang

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…