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Classical optimization theory establishes that zeroth-order (ZO) algorithms suffer from a dimension-dependent slowdown, with convergence rates typically scaling with the model dimension compared to first-order methods. However, in contrast…
Single-objective black box optimization (also known as zeroth-order optimization) is the process of minimizing a scalar objective $f(x)$, given evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we consider multi-objective…
Global optimization of expensive, derivative-free black-box functions requires extreme sample efficiency. While Bayesian optimization (BO) is the current state-of-the-art, its performance hinges on surrogate and acquisition function…
We investigate the effectiveness of adaptive zeroth-order (ZO) optimization for memory-constrained fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Contrary to prior claims, we show that adaptive ZO methods such as ZO-Adam offer no convergence…
We study a class of cooperative multi-agent optimization problems, where each agent is associated with a local action vector and a local cost, and the goal is to cooperatively find the joint action profile that minimizes the average of the…
We study nonlinear constrained optimization problems in which only function evaluations of the objective and constraints are available. Existing zeroth-order methods rely on noisy gradient and Jacobian surrogates in high dimensions, making…
Most zeroth-order optimization algorithms mimic a first-order algorithm but replace the gradient of the objective function with some gradient estimator that can be computed from a small number of function evaluations. This estimator is…
In this paper, we study Lipschitz bandit problems with batched feedback, where the expected reward is Lipschitz and the reward observations are communicated to the player in batches. We introduce a novel landscape-aware algorithm, called…
Distributed demand response is a typical distributed optimization problem that requires coordination among multiple agents to satisfy demand response requirements. However, existing distributed algorithms for this problem still face…
This letter studies distributed stochastic optimization over a peer-to-peer network when agents can query only zeroth-order function values. We propose ZOOM-PB, a coordinate-sampling distributed zeroth-order method equipped with a…
Incentive-based load curtailment unlocks critical demand-side flexibility but is hindered by the limited knowledge of private user parameters and the inherent nonsmoothness of responses due to physical device constraints. We address this…
Black-box zero-th order optimization is a central primitive for applications in fields as diverse as finance, physics, and engineering. In a common formulation of this problem, a designer sequentially attempts candidate solutions, receiving…
This paper investigates how to accelerate the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on nonconvex problems with zeroth-order information available only. We propose a zeroth-order (ZO) distributed primal-dual stochastic…
Modern machine learning algorithms usually involve tuning multiple (from one to thousands) hyperparameters which play a pivotal role in terms of model generalizability. Black-box optimization and gradient-based algorithms are two dominant…
In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…
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 the Lipschitz bandit optimization problem with an emphasis on practical efficiency. Although there is rich literature on regret analysis of this type of problem, e.g., [Kleinberg et al. 2008, Bubeck et al. 2011, Slivkins 2014],…
We propose an enhanced zeroth-order stochastic Frank-Wolfe framework to address constrained finite-sum optimization problems, a structure prevalent in large-scale machine-learning applications. Our method introduces a novel double variance…
Many important machine learning applications amount to solving minimax optimization problems, and in many cases there is no access to the gradient information, but only the function values. In this paper, we focus on such a gradient-free…
We introduce in this paper an optimal first-order method that allows an easy and cheap evaluation of the local Lipschitz constant of the objective's gradient. This constant must ideally be chosen at every iteration as small as possible,…