Related papers: A Zeroth-Order Block Coordinate Descent Algorithm …

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown groundbreaking capabilities across diverse multimodal tasks. However, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial jailbreak attacks, where adversaries craft subtle…

This letter studies distributed stochastic optimization over a peer-to-peer network when agents can query only zeroth-order function values. We propose ZOOM-PB, a coordinate-sampling distributed zeroth-order method equipped with a…

This paper is devoted to solving a convex stochastic optimization problem in a overparameterization setup for the case where the original gradient computation is not available, but an objective function value can be computed. For this class…

This paper studies the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem over a network of agents, where agents only access stochastic zeroth-order information about their local cost functions and collaboratively optimize the global…

We study the problem of distributed zero-order optimization for a class of strongly convex functions. They are formed by the average of local objectives, associated to different nodes in a prescribed network of connections. We propose a…

Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…

Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular optimization tool for the composite and constrained problems in machine learning. However, in many machine learning problems such as black-box attacks and bandit feedback, ADMM…

In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order (FO) optimizers like SGD and Adam has become standard. Yet, as LLMs grow {in size}, the substantial memory…

Numerous methods for crafting adversarial examples were proposed recently with high success rate. Since most existing machine learning based classifiers normalize images into some continuous, real vector, domain firstly, attacks often craft…

In the learning to learn (L2L) framework, we cast the design of optimization algorithms as a machine learning problem and use deep neural networks to learn the update rules. In this paper, we extend the L2L framework to zeroth-order (ZO)…

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…

We propose a novel zeroth-order optimization algorithm based on an efficient sampling strategy. Under mild global regularity conditions on the objective function, we establish non-asymptotic convergence rates for the proposed method.…

We study the problem of attacking a machine learning model in the hard-label black-box setting, where no model information is revealed except that the attacker can make queries to probe the corresponding hard-label decisions. This is a very…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, learning from finite differences of function evaluations without backpropagation, has recently regained attention in deep learning due to its memory efficiency and applicability to gray- or black-box…

As the size of large language models grows exponentially, GPU memory has become a bottleneck for adapting these models to downstream tasks. In this paper, we aim to push the limits of memory-efficient training by minimizing memory usage on…

Zeroth-Order optimization presents a promising memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models by relying solely on forward passes. However, its practical adoption is severely constrained by slow wall-clock convergence and…

We study the problem of generating adversarial examples in a black-box setting in which only loss-oracle access to a model is available. We introduce a framework that conceptually unifies much of the existing work on black-box attacks, and…

This paper considers a consensus optimization problem, where all the nodes in a network, with access to the zeroth-order information of its local objective function only, attempt to cooperatively achieve a common minimizer of the sum of…

We explore whether quantum advantages can be found for the zeroth-order online convex optimization problem, which is also known as bandit convex optimization with multi-point feedback. In this setting, given access to zeroth-order oracles…

Recent work has shown that by approximating the behaviour of a non-differentiable black-box function using a neural network, the black-box can be integrated into a differentiable training pipeline for end-to-end training. This methodology…