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In this paper, we present a unified and general framework for analyzing the batch updating approach to nonlinear, high-dimensional optimization. The framework encompasses all the currently used batch updating approaches, and is applicable…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-30 Tadipatri Uday Kiran Reddy , M. Vidyasagar

This paper deals with stochastic optimization problems involving Markovian noise with a zero-order oracle. We present and analyze a novel derivative-free method for solving such problems in strongly convex smooth and non-smooth settings…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-06 Boris Prokhorov , Semyon Chebykin , Alexander Gasnikov , Aleksandr Beznosikov

In this paper, we investigate accelerated first-order methods for smooth convex optimization problems under inexact information on the gradient of the objective. The noise in the gradient is considered to be additive with two possibilities:…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-10 Vasin Artem , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Vladimir Spokoiny

Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

We investigate the convergence properties of a class of iterative algorithms designed to minimize a potentially non-smooth and noisy objective function, which may be algebraically intractable and whose values may be obtained as the output…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-04 Christophe Andrieu , Nicolas Chopin , Ettore Fincato , Mathieu Gerber

In this paper, we develop zeroth-order algorithms with provably (nearly) optimal sample complexity for stochastic bilevel optimization, where only noisy function evaluations are available. We propose two distinct algorithms: the first is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Alireza Aghasi , Jeongyeol Kwon , Saeed Ghadimi

In this paper, we study the problem of noisy, convex, zeroth order optimisation of a function $f$ over a bounded convex set $\bar{\mathcal X}\subset \mathbb{R}^d$. Given a budget $n$ of noisy queries to the function $f$ that can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-28 Alexandra Carpentier

This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-05 Chenglong Bao , Liang Chen , Weizhi Shao

In this paper, we present convergence guarantees for a modified trust-region method designed for minimizing objective functions whose value and gradient and Hessian estimates are computed with noise. These estimates are produced by generic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-04 Liyuan Cao , Albert S. Berahas , Katya Scheinberg

It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-28 Guy Kornowski , Ohad Shamir

We study convex composite optimization problems, where the objective function is given by the sum of a prox-friendly function and a convex function whose subgradients are estimated under heavy-tailed noise. Existing work often employs…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Chuan He , Zhaosong Lu

In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Aleksandr Lobanov , Nail Bashirov , Alexander Gasnikov

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Michael Muehlebach , Niao He

This letter presents an almost sure convergence of the zeroth-order mirror descent algorithm. The algorithm admits non-smooth convex functions and a biased oracle which only provides noisy function value at any desired point. We approximate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-02 Anik Kumar Paul , Arun D Mahindrakar , Rachel K Kalaimani

We consider the problem of optimizing a high-dimensional convex function using stochastic zeroth-order queries. Under sparsity assumptions on the gradients or function values, we present two algorithms: a successive component/feature…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-27 Yining Wang , Simon Du , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Aarti Singh

We address the problem of zero-order optimization from noisy observations for an objective function satisfying the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz or the strong convexity condition. Additionally, we assume that the objective function has an additive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Arya Akhavan , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

In this paper, we design and analyze a new family of adaptive subgradient methods for solving an important class of weakly convex (possibly nonsmooth) stochastic optimization problems. Adaptive methods that use exponential moving averages…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-26 Parvin Nazari , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , George Michailidis

In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-23 Xiao Wang , Shiqian Ma , Donald Goldfarb , Wei Liu

We provide a novel accelerated first-order method that achieves the asymptotically optimal convergence rate for smooth functions in the first-order oracle model. To this day, Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient Descent (AGD) and variations…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-13 Jelena Diakonikolas , Lorenzo Orecchia

This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Ziyi Chen , Peiran Yu , Heng Huang