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We address black-box convex optimization problems, where the objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be sampled within the feasible set. The challenge is thus to generate a sequence of feasible points converging…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-08 Baiwei Guo , Yuning Jiang , Maryam Kamgarpour , Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate

In this paper, we present several new results on minimizing a nonsmooth and nonconvex function under a Lipschitz condition. Recent work shows that while the classical notion of Clarke stationarity is computationally intractable up to some…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-08 Michael I. Jordan , Tianyi Lin , Manolis Zampetakis

In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-13 Aleksandr Beznosikov , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Alexander Gasnikov

We construct a family of functions suitable for establishing lower bounds on the oracle complexity of first-order minimization of smooth strongly-convex functions. Based on this construction, we derive new lower bounds on the complexity of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-16 Yoel Drori , Adrien Taylor

This paper studies the lower bound complexity for the optimization problem whose objective function is the average of $n$ individual smooth convex functions. We consider the algorithm which gets access to gradient and proximal oracle for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-23 Guangzeng Xie , Luo Luo , Zhihua Zhang

Algorithms for bandit convex optimization and online learning often rely on constructing noisy gradient estimates, which are then used in appropriately adjusted first-order algorithms, replacing actual gradients. Depending on the properties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Xiaowei Hu , Prashanth L. A. , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-24 Nuri Mert Vural , Lu Yu , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Stanislav Volgushev , Murat A. Erdogdu

In this work, we present new simple and optimal algorithms for solving the variational inequality (VI) problem for $p^{th}$-order smooth, monotone operators -- a problem that generalizes convex optimization and saddle-point problems. Recent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-01 Deeksha Adil , Brian Bullins , Arun Jambulapati , Sushant Sachdeva

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-06 Zhongruo Wang , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma , Meisam Razaviyayn

We propose a stochastic optimization method for the minimization of the sum of three convex functions, one of which has Lipschitz continuous gradient as well as restricted strong convexity. Our approach is most suitable in the setting where…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-02-01 Alp Yurtsever , Bang Cong Vu , Volkan Cevher

Universal methods for optimization are designed to achieve theoretically optimal convergence rates without any prior knowledge of the problem's regularity parameters or the accurarcy of the gradient oracle employed by the optimizer. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Kimon Antonakopoulos , Dong Quan Vu , Vokan Cevher , Kfir Y. Levy , Panayotis Mertikopoulos

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Haishan Ye

We consider the minimisation problem of submodular functions and investigate the application of a zeroth-order method to this problem. The method is based on exploiting a Gaussian smoothing random oracle to estimate the smoothed function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Amir Ali Farzin , Yuen-Man Pun , Philipp Braun , Tyler Summers , Iman Shames

We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-27 Shuyao Li , Stephen J. Wright

We consider variants of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm for constrained smooth convex minimization, that instead of access to the standard oracle for minimizing a linear function over the feasible set, have access to an oracle that can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-10 Dan Garber , Noam Wolf

The analysis of gradient descent-type methods typically relies on the Lipschitz continuity of the objective gradient. This generally requires an expensive hyperparameter tuning process to appropriately calibrate a stepsize for a given…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-16 Albert S. Berahas , Lindon Roberts , Fred Roosta

To solve convex optimization problems with a noisy gradient input, we analyze the global behavior of subgradient-like flows under stochastic errors. The objective function is composite, being equal to the sum of two convex functions, one…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-05 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Jalal Fadili , Hedy Attouch

In compressed sensing a sparse vector is approximately retrieved from an under-determined equation system $Ax=b$. Exact retrieval would mean solving a large combinatorial problem which is well known to be NP-hard. For $b$ of the form…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-06 Marcus Carlsson , Daniele Gerosa , Carl Olsson

We introduce the concept of strong high-order approximate minimizers for nonconvex optimization problems. These apply in both standard smooth and composite non-smooth settings, and additionally allow convex or inexpensive constraints. An…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-30 Coralia Cartis , Nick Gould , Philippe L. Toint

We consider sum-type strongly convex optimization problem (first term) with smooth convex not proximal friendly composite (second term). We show that the complexity of this problem can be split into optimal number of incremental oracle…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-12 Darina Dvinskikh , Sergey Omelchenko , Alexander Tyurin , Alexander Gasnikov