Related papers: Curvature-Aware Derivative-Free Optimization
Frequently, when dealing with many machine learning models, optimization problems appear to be challenging due to a limited understanding of the constructions and characterizations of the objective functions in these problems. Therefore,…
A novel class of derivative-free optimization algorithms is developed. The main idea is to utilize certain non-commutative maps in order to approximate the gradient of the objective function. Convergence properties of the novel algorithms…
We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite…
We are interested in derivative-free optimization of high-dimensional functions. The sample complexity of existing methods is high and depends on problem dimensionality, unlike the dimensionality-independent rates of first-order methods.…
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth function in the derivative-free setting using. In particular, we propose and study a simplified variant of the direct search method (of direction type), which we call…
In many optimization problems arising from scientific, engineering and artificial intelligence applications, objective and constraint functions are available only as the output of a black-box or simulation oracle that does not provide…
Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…
We consider minimizing high-dimensional smooth nonconvex objectives using only noisy pairwise comparisons. Unlike classical zeroth-order methods limited by the ambient dimension $d$, we propose Noisy-Comparison Random Search (NCRS), a…
Model-based derivative-free optimization (DFO) methods are an important class of DFO methods that are known to struggle with solving high-dimensional optimization problems. Recent research has shown that incorporating random subspaces into…
This paper proposes a random subspace trust-region algorithm for general convex-constrained derivative-free optimization (DFO) problems. Similar to previous random subspace DFO methods, the convergence of our algorithm requires a certain…
We consider derivative-free algorithms for stochastic and non-stochastic convex optimization problems that use only function values rather than gradients. Focusing on non-asymptotic bounds on convergence rates, we show that if pairs of…
We propose and analyze a model-based derivative-free (DFO) algorithm for solving bound-constrained optimization problems where the objective function is the composition of a smooth function and a vector of black-box functions. We assume…
An Adagrad-inspired class of algorithms for smooth unconstrained optimization is presented in which the objective function is never evaluated and yet the gradient norms decrease at least as fast as $\calO(1/\sqrt{k+1})$ while second-order…
We propose a derivative-free saddle-search algorithm designed to locate transition states using only function evaluations. The algorithm employs a nested architecture consisting of an inner eigenvector search and an outer saddle-point…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely-used approach to learn models that are robust against distribution shift. Compared with the standard optimization setting, the objective function in DRO is more difficult to optimize,…
Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has been a popular one-shot paradigm for NAS due to its high efficiency. It introduces trainable architecture parameters to represent the importance of candidate operations and proposes…
We propose a new random method to minimize deterministic continuous functions over subsets $\mathcal{S}$ of high-dimensional space $\mathbb{R}^K$ without assuming convexity. Our procedure alternates between a Global Search (GS) regime to…
A new universal derivative-free optimization method CDOS (Conjugate Direction with Orthogonal Shift) is proposed. The CDOS method was specially developed to solve optimization tasks where the objective function and constraints are black…
In this work, we utilize a Trust Region based Derivative Free Optimization (DFO-TR) method to directly maximize the Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC), which is a nonsmooth, noisy function. We show that AUC is a smooth…
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\R^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. While importance sampling is one of the most popular techniques used by machine…