Related papers: On the Convergence of Prior-Guided Zeroth-Order Op…
The optimization problems with a sparsity constraint is a class of important global optimization problems. A typical type of thresholding algorithms for solving such a problem adopts the traditional full steepest descent direction or…
Many problems encountered in science and engineering can be formulated as estimating a low-rank object (e.g., matrices and tensors) from incomplete, and possibly corrupted, linear measurements. Through the lens of matrix and tensor…
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…
This paper studies the challenging black-box adversarial attack that aims to generate adversarial examples against a black-box model by only using output feedback of the model to input queries. Some previous methods improve the query…
Following the seminal work of Nesterov, accelerated optimization methods have been used to powerfully boost the performance of first-order, gradient-based parameter estimation in scenarios where second-order optimization strategies are…
We propose an Adagrad-like algorithm for multi-objective unconstrained optimization that relies on the computation of a common descent direction only. Unlike classical local algorithms for multi-objective optimization, our approach does not…
Comparison-Based Optimization (CBO) is an optimization paradigm that assumes only very limited access to the objective function f(x). Despite the growing relevance of CBO to real-world applications, this field has received little attention…
This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…
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)…
The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…
This paper proposes a novel proximal-gradient algorithm for a decentralized optimization problem with a composite objective containing smooth and non-smooth terms. Specifically, the smooth and nonsmooth terms are dealt with by gradient and…
The frame algorithm uses a simple recursive formula to approximate an unknown vector from its frame coefficients. This note introduces an adaptive version of the frame algorithm that maximizes the error reduction between steps in terms of…
We consider distributed smooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization over networks, modeled as a connected graph. We examine the behavior of distributed gradient-based algorithms near strict saddle points. Specifically, we establish that (i)…
In this paper, we design and analyze a new zeroth-order online algorithm, namely, the zeroth-order online alternating direction method of multipliers (ZOO-ADMM), which enjoys dual advantages of being gradient-free operation and employing…
Gradient regularization (GR) is a method that penalizes the gradient norm of the training loss during training. While some studies have reported that GR can improve generalization performance, little attention has been paid to it from the…
We propose Zeroth-Order Random Matrix Search for Learning from Demonstrations (ZORMS-LfD). ZORMS-LfD enables the costs, constraints, and dynamics of constrained optimal control problems, in both continuous and discrete time, to be learned…
Performance analysis of first-order algorithms with inexact oracles has gained recent attention due to various emerging applications in which obtaining exact gradients is impossible or computationally expensive. Previous research has…
In this paper, the problem of online distributed zeroth-order optimization subject to a set constraint is studied via a multi-agent network, where each agent can communicate with its immediate neighbors via a time-varying directed graph.…
Many recent successes of machine learning went hand in hand with advances in optimization. The exchange of ideas between these fields has worked both ways, with machine learning building on standard optimization procedures such as gradient…
Classic zeroth-order optimization approaches typically optimize for a smoothed version of the original function, i.e., the expected objective under randomly perturbed model parameters. This can be interpreted as encouraging the loss values…