Related papers: Optimization by moving ridge functions: Derivative…
We propose a direct mesh-free method for performing topology optimization by integrating a density field approximation neural network with a displacement field approximation neural network. We show that this direct integration approach can…
The goal of this paper is to investigate an approach for derivative-free optimization that has not received sufficient attention in the literature and is yet one of the simplest to implement and parallelize. It consists of computing…
We propose a derivative-free trust-region method based on finite-difference gradient approximations for smooth optimization problems with convex constraints. The proposed method does not require computing an approximate stationarity…
This work presents the first projection-free algorithm to solve stochastic bi-level optimization problems, where the objective function depends on the solution of another stochastic optimization problem. The proposed $\textbf{S}$tochastic…
Gradient-free optimizers allow for tackling problems regardless of the smoothness or differentiability of their objective function, but they require many more iterations to converge when compared to gradient-based algorithms. This has made…
Algorithm unrolling has emerged as a learning-based optimization paradigm that unfolds truncated iterative algorithms in trainable neural-network optimizers. We introduce Stochastic UnRolled Federated learning (SURF), a method that expands…
We study the ridge method for min-max problems, and investigate its convergence without any convexity, differentiability or qualification assumption. The central issue is to determine whether the ''parametric optimality formula'' provides a…
The optimisation of nonsmooth, nonconvex functions without access to gradients is a particularly challenging problem that is frequently encountered, for example in model parameter optimisation problems. Bilevel optimisation of parameters is…
This paper is devoted to a new modification of a recently proposed adaptive stochastic mirror descent algorithm for constrained convex optimization problems in the case of several convex functional constraints. Algorithms, standard and its…
In this paper, we propose objective-function-free (OFF) variants of the proximal Newton method for nonconvex composite optimization problems and the regularized Newton method for unconstrained optimization problems, respectively, using…
Many large-scale optimization problems arising in science and engineering are naturally defined at multiple levels of discretization or model fidelity. Multilevel methods exploit this hierarchy to accelerate convergence by combining coarse-…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…
We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…
Optimal power flow (OPF) is a critical optimization problem for power systems to operate at points where cost or other operational objectives are optimized. Due to the non-convexity of the set of feasible OPF operating points, it is…
Inexpensive surrogates are useful for reducing the cost of science and engineering studies involving large-scale, complex computational models with many input parameters. A ridge approximation is one class of surrogate that models a…
The $\mathcal{VU}$-algorithm is a superlinearly convergent method for minimizing nonsmooth, convex functions. At each iteration, the algorithm works with a certain $\mathcal{V}$-space and its orthogonal $\U$-space, such that the…
Decentralized optimization algorithms have received much attention due to the recent advances in network information processing. However, conventional decentralized algorithms based on projected gradient descent are incapable of handling…
We consider distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems, reformulated as distributionally robust feasibility (DRF) problems, with multiple expectation constraints. We propose a generic stochastic first-order meta-algorithm, where…
We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…
A new technique of global optimization and its applications in particular to neural networks are presented. The algorithm is also compared to other global optimization algorithms such as Gradient descent (GD), Monte Carlo (MC), Genetic…