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A variety of practical problems can be modeled by the decision-making process in multi-player games where a group of self-interested players aim at optimizing their own local objectives, while the objectives depend on the actions taken by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-09 Yuanhanqing Huang , Jianghai Hu

Stochastic zeroth-order (SZO), or gradient-free, optimization allows to optimize arbitrary functions by relying only on function evaluations under parameter perturbations, however, the iteration complexity of SZO methods suffers a factor…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Artem Sokolov , Julian Hitschler , Mayumi Ohta , Stefan Riezler

Interest in stochastic zeroth-order (SZO) methods has recently been revived in black-box optimization scenarios such as adversarial black-box attacks to deep neural networks. SZO methods only require the ability to evaluate the objective…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Mayumi Ohta , Nathaniel Berger , Artem Sokolov , Stefan Riezler

As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Sijia Liu , Bhavya Kailkhura , Pin-Yu Chen , Paishun Ting , Shiyu Chang , Lisa Amini

Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization plays an essential role in scenarios where gradient information is inaccessible or unaffordable, such as black-box systems and resource-constrained environments. While existing adaptive methods such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yao Shu , Qixin Zhang , Kun He , Zhongxiang Dai

We present two first-order, sequential optimization algorithms to solve constrained optimization problems. We consider a black-box setting with a priori unknown, non-convex objective and constraint functions that have Lipschitz continuous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-19 Abraham P. Vinod , Arie Israel , Ufuk Topcu

In this work we address the problem of convex optimization in a multi-agent setting where the objective is to minimize the mean of local cost functions whose derivatives are not available (e.g. black-box models). Moreover agents can only…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-14 Alessio Maritan , Luca Schenato

This work is devoted to solving the composite optimization problem with the mixture oracle: for the smooth part of the problem, we have access to the gradient, and for the non-smooth part, only the one-point zero-order oracle is available.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-23 Aleksandr Beznosikov , Ivan Stepanov , Artyom Voronov , Alexander Gasnikov

Online bilevel optimization (OBO) is a powerful framework for machine learning problems where both outer and inner objectives evolve over time, requiring dynamic updates. Current OBO approaches rely on deterministic \textit{window-smoothed}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Parvin Nazari , Bojian Hou , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Li Shen , George Michailidis

Non-analytical objectives and constraints often arise in control systems, particularly in problems with complex dynamics, which are challenging yet lack efficient solution methods. In this work, we consider general constrained optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-16 Yuke Zhou , Ruiyang Jin , Siyang Gao , Jianxiao Wang , Jie Song

In the learning to learn (L2L) framework, we cast the design of optimization algorithms as a machine learning problem and use deep neural networks to learn the update rules. In this paper, we extend the L2L framework to zeroth-order (ZO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Yangjun Ruan , Yuanhao Xiong , Sashank Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a gradient-free alternative to first-order (FO) methods by estimating gradients via finite differences of function evaluations, and has recently emerged as a memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yicheng Lang , Changsheng Wang , Yihua Zhang , Mingyi Hong , Zheng Zhang , Wotao Yin , Sijia Liu

This paper mainly addresses the distributed online optimization problem where the local objective functions are assumed to be convex or non-convex. First, the distributed algorithms are proposed for the convex and non-convex situations,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-24 Yaowen Wang , Lipo Mo , Min Zuo , Yuanshi Zheng

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-04 Bin Gu , Xiyuan Wei , Hualin Zhang , Yi Chang , Heng Huang

This paper deals with the black-box optimization problem. In this setup, we do not have access to the gradient of the objective function, therefore, we need to estimate it somehow. We propose a new type of approximation JAGUAR, that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-03 Andrey Veprikov , Aleksandr Bogdanov , Vladislav Minashkin , Aleksandr Beznosikov

Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Wanli Shi , Hongchang Gao , Bin Gu

Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO) provides powerful tools for optimizing functions where explicit gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. However, the underlying mechanisms of popular ZOO methods, particularly those employing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Junbin Qiu , Zhengpeng Xie , Xiangda Yan , Yongjie Yang , Yao Shu

Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2022-10-31 Elvin Lo , Pin-Yu Chen

We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Taha El Bakkali , El Mahdi Chayti , Qiuyi Zhang , Imane Rahali , Omar Saadi

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