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This work studies online zero-order optimization of convex and Lipschitz functions. We present a novel gradient estimator based on two function evaluations and randomization on the $\ell_1$-sphere. Considering different geometries of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-09-21 Arya Akhavan , Evgenii Chzhen , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

Inverse optimization refers to the inference of unknown parameters of an optimization problem based on knowledge of its optimal solutions. This paper considers inverse optimization in the setting where measurements of the optimal solutions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-12-27 Anil Aswani , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Auyon Siddiq

In this paper, we demonstrate how to learn the objective function of a decision-maker while only observing the problem input data and the decision-maker's corresponding decisions over multiple rounds. We present exact algorithms for this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-31 Andreas Bärmann , Alexander Martin , Sebastian Pokutta , Oskar Schneider

In this paper, the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is addressed to reconstruct the unknown cost function underlying an observed optimal policy in a model-free manner, whose online adaptation with completely off-policy system…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-20 Yibei Li , Yuexin Cao , Zhixin Liu , Lihua Xie

In this study, we consider an optimization problem with uncertainty dependent on decision variables, which has recently attracted attention due to its importance in machine learning and pricing applications. In this problem, the gradient of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-31 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

Online mirror descent (OMD) and dual averaging (DA) -- two fundamental algorithms for online convex optimization -- are known to have very similar (and sometimes identical) performance guarantees when used with a fixed learning rate. Under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Huang Fang , Nicholas J. A. Harvey , Victor S. Portella , Michael P. Friedlander

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

Online minimization of an unknown convex function over the interval $[0,1]$ is considered under first-order stochastic bandit feedback, which returns a random realization of the gradient of the function at each query point. Without knowing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Sattar Vakili , Sudeep Salgia , Qing Zhao

Spurred by the enthusiasm surrounding the "Big Data" paradigm, the mathematical and algorithmic tools of online optimization have found widespread use in problems where the trade-off between data exploration and exploitation plays a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-18 E. Veronica Belmega , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Romain Negrel , Luca Sanguinetti

Learning theory has largely focused on two main learning scenarios. The first is the classical statistical setting where instances are drawn i.i.d. from a fixed distribution and the second scenario is the online learning, completely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-04-28 Alexander Rakhlin , Karthik Sridharan , Ambuj Tewari

We study Online Convex Optimization in the unbounded setting where neither predictions nor gradient are constrained. The goal is to simultaneously adapt to both the sequence of gradients and the comparator. We first develop parameter-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Zakaria Mhammedi , Wouter M. Koolen

Decision-makers often have access to machine-learned predictions about future demand that can help guide online resource allocation decisions. However, such predictions may be inaccurate. We develop a framework for online resource…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Negin Golrezaei , Patrick Jaillet , Zijie Zhou

Online learning and model reference adaptive control have many interesting intersections. One area where they differ however is in how the algorithms are analyzed and what objective or metric is used to discriminate "good" algorithms from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-24 Travis E. Gibson , Sawal Acharya

In this paper we propose a model-based approach to the design of online optimization algorithms, with the goal of improving the tracking of the solution trajectory (trajectories) w.r.t. state-of-the-art methods. We focus first on quadratic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-24 Nicola Bastianello , Ruggero Carli , Sandro Zampieri

We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Xinran Zheng , Tara Javidi , Behrouz Touri

We study online learning in adversarial nonstationary environments. Since the future can be very different from the past, a critical challenge is to gracefully forget the history while new data comes in. To formalize this intuition, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Zhiyu Zhang , David Bombara , Heng Yang

We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Ashok Cutkosky , Harsh Mehta , Francesco Orabona

We consider online forecasting problems for non-convex machine learning models. Forecasting introduces several challenges such as (i) frequent updates are necessary to deal with concept drift issues since the dynamics of the environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-28 Sergul Aydore , Tianhao Zhu , Dean Foster

We consider distributed online convex optimization problems, where the distributed system consists of various computing units connected through a time-varying communication graph. In each time step, each computing unit selects a constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-23 Deming Yuan , Alexandre Proutiere , Guodong Shi

Online convex optimization is a sequential prediction framework with the goal to track and adapt to the environment through evaluating proper convex loss functions. We study efficient particle filtering methods from the perspective of such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-23 Mahdi Azarafrooz