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Structured optimization problems are ubiquitous in fields like data science and engineering. The goal in structured optimization is using a prescribed set of points, called atoms, to build up a solution that minimizes or maximizes a given…
Aerodynamic design optimization is an important problem in aircraft design that depends on the interplay between a numerical optimizer and a high-fidelity flow physics solver. Derivative-based, first and (quasi) second order, optimization…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
We re-introduce a derivative-free subspace optimization framework originating from Chapter 5 of the Ph.D. thesis [Z. Zhang, On Derivative-Free Optimization Methods, Ph.D. thesis, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 2012] of the author…
We consider unconstrained optimization problems where only "stochastic" estimates of the objective function are observable as replicates from a Monte Carlo oracle. The Monte Carlo oracle is assumed to provide no direct observations of the…
We consider distributed optimization with smooth convex objective functions defined on an undirected connected graph. Inspired by mirror descent mehod and RLC circuits, we propose a novel distributed mirror descent method. Compared with…
In this paper, we consider mixed-integer nonsmooth constrained optimization problems whose objective/constraint functions are available only as the output of a black-box zeroth-order oracle (i.e., an oracle that does not provide derivative…
In this note, we present a derivative-free trust-region (TR) algorithm for reliability based optimization (RBO) problems. The proposed algorithm consists of solving a set of subproblems, in which simple surrogate models of the reliability…
We propose a new model-order reduction framework to poorly reducible problems arising from parametric partial differential equations with geometric variability. In such problems, the solution manifold exhibits a slowly decaying Kolmogorov…
Trajectory optimization is an important tool for control and planning of complex, underactuated robots, and has shown impressive results in real world robotic tasks. However, in applications where the cost function to be optimized is…
Distributed optimization is fundamental to modern machine learning applications like federated learning, but existing methods often struggle with ill-conditioned problems and face stability-versus-speed tradeoffs. We introduce fractional…
In this work, we propose a novel adaptive stochastic gradient-free (ASGF) approach for solving high-dimensional nonconvex optimization problems based on function evaluations. We employ a directional Gaussian smoothing of the target function…
We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…
An algorithm for unconstrained non-convex optimization is described, which does not evaluate the objective function and in which minimization is carried out, at each iteration, within a randomly selected subspace. It is shown that this…
Optimal Power Flow (OPF) can be modeled as a non-convex Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Program (QCQP). Our purpose is to solve OPF to global optimality. To this end, we specialize the Mixed-Integer Quadratic Convex Reformulation method…
This paper proposes a new robust optimization (RO) formulation namely the RO under objective functional uncertainty (ObRO). The ObRO adopts a min-max structure where the inner problem finds the worst-case objective function in a continuous…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
Topology optimization (TO) is a family of computational methods that derive near-optimal geometries from formal problem descriptions. Despite their success, established TO methods are limited to generating single solutions, restricting the…
In this paper, we propose a random gradient-free method for optimization in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces, applicable to functional optimization in diverse settings. Though such problems are often solved through finite-dimensional…
We consider the problem of minimizing a function over the manifold of orthogonal matrices. The majority of algorithms for this problem compute a direction in the tangent space, and then use a retraction to move in that direction while…