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

Fine-tuning large pre-trained LLMs generally demands extensive GPU memory. Traditional first-order optimizers like SGD encounter substantial difficulties due to increased memory requirements from storing activations and gradients during…

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is an effective approach for global optimization of black-box functions when function evaluations are expensive. Most prior works use Gaussian processes to model the black-box function, however, the use of kernels…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has gained attention as a memory-efficient alternative to first-order (FO) methods, particularly in settings where gradient computation is expensive or even impractical. Beyond its memory efficiency, in this…

Fine-tuning is powerful for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, but it often results in huge memory usages. A promising approach to mitigate this is using Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, which estimates gradients to replace…

We consider escaping saddle points of nonconvex problems where only the function evaluations can be accessed. Although a variety of works have been proposed, the majority of them require either second or first-order information, and only a…

Depending on how much information an adversary can access to, adversarial attacks can be classified as white-box attack and black-box attack. For white-box attack, optimization-based attack algorithms such as projected gradient descent…

This paper investigates the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by the summation of $n$ local cost functions. We solve such a problem by involving zeroth-order (ZO) information…

Block-coordinate descent (BCD) is a popular framework for large-scale regularized optimization problems with block-separable structure. Existing methods have several limitations. They often assume that subproblems can be solved exactly at…

Approaches based on Binary decision diagrams (BDDs) have recently achieved state-of-the-art results for multiobjective integer programming problems. The variable ordering used in constructing BDDs can have a significant impact on their size…

Although a large number of optimization algorithms have been proposed for black box optimization problems, the no free lunch theorems inform us that no algorithm can beat others on all types of problems. Different types of optimization…

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…

Zeroth-order or derivative-free optimization (MeZO) is an attractive strategy for finetuning large language models (LLMs) because it eliminates the memory overhead of backpropagation. However, it converges slowly due to the inherent curse…

Adversarial robustness in structured data remains an underexplored frontier compared to vision and language domains. In this work, we introduce a novel black-box, decision-based adversarial attack tailored for tabular data. Our approach…

Single-objective black box optimization (also known as zeroth-order optimization) is the process of minimizing a scalar objective $f(x)$, given evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we consider multi-objective…

Zeroth-order (a.k.a, derivative-free) methods are a class of effective optimization methods for solving complex machine learning problems, where gradients of the objective functions are not available or computationally prohibitive.…

This dissertation explores block decomposable methods for large-scale optimization problems. It focuses on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) schemes and block coordinate descent (BCD) methods. Specifically, it introduces a…

Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…

Training large language models typically demands extensive GPU memory and substantial financial investment, which poses a barrier for many small- to medium-sized teams. In this paper, we propose a full-parameter pre-training and fine-tuning…

Two OFFO (Objective-Function Free Optimization) noise tolerant algorithms are presented that handle bound constraints, inexact gradients and use second-order information when available.The first is a multi-level method exploiting a…

A wide spectrum of design and decision problems, including parameter tuning, A/B testing and drug design, intrinsically are instances of black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful tool that models and optimizes such…