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The article is devoted to the development of algorithmic methods ensuring efficient complexity bounds for strongly convex-concave saddle point problems in the case when one of the groups of variables is high-dimensional, and the other is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-26 Egor Gladin , Ilya Kuruzov , Fedor Stonyakin , Dmitry Pasechnyuk , Mohammad Alkousa , Alexander Gasnikov

We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-16 Guy Kornowski , Ohad Shamir

This paper studies second-order methods for convex-concave minimax optimization. Monteiro and Svaiter (2012) proposed a method to solve the problem with an optimal iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ to find an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-16 Lesi Chen , Chengchang Liu , Jingzhao Zhang

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

Saddle point optimization is a critical problem employed in numerous real-world applications, including portfolio optimization, generative adversarial networks, and robotics. It has been extensively studied in cases where the objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Shubhankar Agarwal , Hamzah I. Khan , Sandeep P. Chinchali , David Fridovich-Keil

Recent focus on robustness to adversarial attacks for deep neural networks produced a large variety of algorithms for training robust models. Most of the effective algorithms involve solving the min-max optimization problem for training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Yasaman Esfandiari , Aditya Balu , Keivan Ebrahimi , Umesh Vaidya , Nicola Elia , Soumik Sarkar

In this paper, we propose a class of penalty methods with stochastic approximation for solving stochastic nonlinear programming problems. We assume that only noisy gradients or function values of the objective function are available via…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-20 Xiao Wang , Shiqian Ma , Ya-xiang Yuan

We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Arya Akhavan , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

We study a stochastic first order primal-dual method for solving convex-concave saddle point problems over real reflexive Banach spaces using Bregman divergences and relative smoothness assumptions, in which we allow for stochastic error in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-23 Antonio Silveti-Falls , Cesare Molinari , Jalal Fadili

This paper considers stochastic convex optimization problems with two sets of constraints: (a) deterministic constraints on the domain of the optimization variable, which are difficult to project onto; and (b) deterministic or stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-25 Zeeshan Akhtar , Ketan Rajawat

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Ruiyang Jin , Yuke Zhou , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Siyang Gao

In this paper, we consider a stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem with the cost function being distributed over $n$ agents having access only to zeroth-order (ZO) information of the cost. This problem has various machine…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-11 Xinlei Yi , Shengjun Zhang , Tao Yang , Karl H. Johansson

Nonconvex optimization problems such as the ones in training deep neural networks suffer from a phenomenon called saddle point proliferation. This means that there are a vast number of high error saddle points present in the loss function.…

Numerical Analysis · Computer Science 2016-11-08 Martin Arjovsky

Local search heuristics for non-convex optimizations are popular in applied machine learning. However, in general it is hard to guarantee that such algorithms even converge to a local minimum, due to the existence of complicated saddle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-19 Anima Anandkumar , Rong Ge

In this paper, we study and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for solving bilvel problems, when neither the upper/lower objective values, nor their unbiased gradient estimates are available. In particular, exploiting…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-02 Alireza Aghasi , Saeed Ghadimi

Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Chi Jin , Praneeth Netrapalli , Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Michael I. Jordan

This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Anik Kumar Paul , Shalabh Bhatnagar

A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-29 Razvan Pascanu , Yann N. Dauphin , Surya Ganguli , Yoshua Bengio

We provide an overview of primal-dual algorithms for nonsmooth and non-convex-concave saddle-point problems. This flows around a new analysis of such methods, using Bregman divergences to formulate simplified conditions for convergence.

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-03 Tuomo Valkonen

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-15 Shengjun Zhang , Colleen P. Bailey