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We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\R^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. While importance sampling is one of the most popular techniques used by machine…
We consider trust-region methods for solving optimization problems where the objective is the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function and a nonsmooth, convex regularizer. We extend the global convergence theory of such methods to include…
Three dimensional (3D) topology optimization problems always involve huge numbers of Degrees of Freedom (DOFs) in finite element analysis (FEA) and design variables in numerical optimization, respectively. This will inevitably lead to large…
Recent advances in derivative-free optimization allow efficient approximation of the global-optimal solutions of sophisticated functions, such as functions with many local optima, non-differentiable and non-continuous functions. This…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely used framework for optimizing objective functionals in the presence of both randomness and model-form uncertainty. A key step in the practical solution of many DRO problems is a…
Smooth autonomous dynamical systems modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODEs) cannot robustly and globally stabilize a point in compact, boundaryless manifolds. This obstruction, which is topological in nature, implies that…
We consider continuous-time dynamics for distributed optimization with set constraints in the paper. To handle the computational complexity of projection-based dynamics due to solving a general quadratic optimization subproblem with…
During the last decade, incremental sampling-based motion planning algorithms, such as the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) have been shown to work well in practice and to possess theoretical guarantees such as probabilistic…
In this paper we study a new approach in optimization that aims to search a large domain D where a given function takes large, small or specific values via an iterative optimization algorithm based on the gradient. We show that the…
We study derivative-free methods for policy optimization over the class of linear policies. We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving…
This paper proposes a distributed stochastic projection-free algorithm for large-scale constrained finite-sum optimization whose constraint set is complicated such that the projection onto the constraint set can be expensive. The global…
We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…
The trust region method is an algorithm traditionally used in the field of derivative free optimization. The method works by iteratively constructing surrogate models (often linear or quadratic functions) to approximate the true objective…
We design Local LMO - a new projection-free gradient-type method for constrained optimization. The key algorithmic idea is to replace the global linear minimization oracle over the constraint set used by Frank-Wolfe (FW) with a local linear…
Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…
Current state-of-the-art multi-objective optimization solvers, by computing gradients of all $m$ objective functions per iteration, produce after $k$ iterations a measure of proximity to critical conditions that is upper-bounded by…
Optimal transport (OT) has enjoyed great success in machine learning as a principled way to align datasets via a least-cost correspondence, driven in large part by the runtime efficiency of the Sinkhorn algorithm (Cuturi, 2013). However,…
Global optimization of expensive functions has important applications in physical and computer experiments. It is a challenging problem to develop efficient optimization scheme, because each function evaluation can be costly and the…
These notes focus on the minimization of convex functionals using first-order optimization methods, which are fundamental in many areas of applied mathematics and engineering. The primary goal of this document is to introduce and analyze…
This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…