Related papers: Full-low evaluation methods for derivative-free op…
We investigate the convergence properties of a class of iterative algorithms designed to minimize a potentially non-smooth and noisy objective function, which may be algebraically intractable and whose values may be obtained as the output…
Global optimization of black-box functions from noisy samples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning and scientific computing. Traditional methods such as Bayesian Optimization often converge to local minima on multi-modal…
This paper focuses on proposing a deep learning initialized iterative method (Int-Deep) for low-dimensional nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). The corresponding framework consists of two phases. In the first phase, an…
We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…
Motivated by programmatic advertising optimization, we consider the task of sequentially allocating budget across a set of resources. At every time step, a feasible allocation is chosen and only a corresponding random return is observed.…
In many contemporary optimization problems such as those arising in machine learning, it can be computationally challenging or even infeasible to evaluate an entire function or its derivatives. This motivates the use of stochastic…
In nonsmooth optimization, a negative subgradient is not necessarily a descent direction, making the design of convergent descent methods based on zeroth-order and first-order information a challenging task. The well-studied bundle methods…
Quasi-Newton methods refer to a class of algorithms at the interface between first and second order methods. They aim to progress as substantially as second order methods per iteration, while maintaining the computational complexity of…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
We revisit random search for stochastic optimization, where only noisy function evaluations are available. We show that the method works under weaker smoothness assumptions than previously considered, and that stronger assumptions enable…
A fundamental challenge in deep learning is that the optimal step sizes for update steps of stochastic gradient descent are unknown. In traditional optimization, line searches are used to determine good step sizes, however, in deep…
Projection-based model reduction has become a popular approach to reduce the cost associated with integrating large-scale dynamical systems so they can be used in many-query settings such as optimization and uncertainty quantification. For…
Recent progress in robust statistical learning has mainly tackled convex problems, like mean estimation or linear regression, with non-convex challenges receiving less attention. Phase retrieval exemplifies such a non-convex problem,…
Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search…
This paper is devoted to the study (common in many applications) of the black-box optimization problem, where the black-box represents a gradient-free oracle $\tilde{f} = f(x) + \xi$ providing the objective function value with some…
In this paper we present a subgradient method with non-monotone line search for the minimization of convex functions with simple convex constraints. Different from the standard subgradient method with prefixed step sizes, the new method…
Motivated by the emergence of federated learning (FL), we design and analyze federated methods for addressing: (i) Nondifferentiable nonconvex optimization; (ii) Bilevel optimization; (iii) Minimax problems; and (iv) Two-stage stochastic…
While test-time fine-tuning is beneficial in few-shot learning, the need for multiple backpropagation steps can be prohibitively expensive in real-time or low-resource scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose an approach that…
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…