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Stochastic coordinate descent algorithms are efficient methods in which each iterate is obtained by fixing most coordinates at their values from the current iteration, and approximately minimizing the objective with respect to the remaining…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-02 Eméric Gbaguidi

Differentially private zeroth-order optimization methods have recently gained popularity in private fine tuning of machine learning models due to their reduced memory requirements. Current approaches for privatizing zeroth-order methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-10 Devansh Gupta , Meisam Razaviyayn , Vatsal Sharan

Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) [Polyak, 1963] condition is a weaker condition than the strong convexity but suffices to ensure a global convergence for the Gradient Descent algorithm. In this paper, we study the lower bound of algorithms using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-03 Pengyun Yue , Cong Fang , Zhouchen Lin

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Michael Muehlebach , Niao He

The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-28 Elad Hazan , Kfir Y. Levy , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Marco Rando , Cesare Molinari , Lorenzo Rosasco , Silvia Villa

We consider unconstrained randomized optimization of convex objective functions. We analyze the Random Pursuit algorithm, which iteratively computes an approximate solution to the optimization problem by repeated optimization over a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-05-25 Sebastian U. Stich , Christian L. Müller , Bernd Gärtner

In this paper, we propose and analyze algorithms for zeroth-order optimization of non-convex composite objectives, focusing on reducing the complexity dependence on dimensionality. This is achieved by exploiting the low dimensional…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-16 Weijia Shao , Sahin Albayrak

In this paper, we propose a new way to obtain optimal convergence rates for smooth stochastic (strong) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for optimization tasks where gradients have nonrandom noise. In contrast to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-16 Darina Dvinskikh , Alexander Tyurin , Alexander Gasnikov , Sergey Omelchenko

We study the convergence rate of gradient-based local search methods for solving low-rank matrix recovery problems with general objectives in both symmetric and asymmetric cases, under the assumption of the restricted isometry property.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-10 Yingjie Bi , Haixiang Zhang , Javad Lavaei

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-20 HanQin Cai , Daniel Mckenzie , Wotao Yin , Zhenliang Zhang

We construct a zeroth-order gradient estimator for a smooth function defined on the probability simplex. The proposed estimator queries the simplex only. We prove that projected gradient descent and the exponential weights algorithm, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Tijana Zrnic , Eric Mazumdar

The paper presents a review of the state-of-the-art of subgradient and accelerated methods of convex optimization, including in the presence of disturbances and access to various information about the objective function (function value,…

In this paper, we consider a class of nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems, i.e., NC-PL minimax problems, whose objective functions satisfy the Polyak-\L ojasiewicz (PL) condition with respect to the inner variable. We propose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-30 Zi Xu , Zi-Qi Wang , Jun-Lin Wang , Yu-Hong Dai

We develop a new proximal-gradient method for minimizing the sum of a differentiable, possibly nonconvex, function plus a convex, possibly non differentiable, function. The key features of the proposed method are the definition of a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-05-13 Silvia Bonettini , Ignace Loris , Federica Porta , Marco Prato

Proximal gradient methods are a popular tool for the solution of structured, nonsmooth minimization problems. In this work, we investigate an extension of the former to general Banach spaces and provide worst-case convergence rates for,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Gerd Wachsmuth , Daniel Walter

Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Kang Chen , Yasong Feng , Tianyu Wang

We propose a method for zeroth order stochastic convex optimization that attains the suboptimality rate of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{7}T^{-1/2})$ after $T$ queries for a convex bounded function $f:{\mathbb R}^n\to{\mathbb R}$. The method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-13 Tengyuan Liang , Hariharan Narayanan , Alexander Rakhlin

We study the linear convergence rates of the proximal gradient method for composite functions satisfying two classes of Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) inequality: the PL inequality, the variant of PL inequality defined by the proximal map-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Qingyuan Kong , Rujun Jiang , Yihan He

In this note, we establish a new exact worst-case linear convergence rate of the proximal gradient method in terms of the proximal gradient norm, which complements the recent results in [1] and implies a refined descent lemma.descent lemma.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-13 Xiaoya Zhang , Hui Zhang