Related papers: Improve Single-Point Zeroth-Order Optimization Usi…

Rank-based zeroth-order (ZO) optimization -- which relies only on the ordering of function evaluations -- offers strong robustness to noise and monotone transformations, and underlies many successful algorithms such as CMA-ES, natural…

Low-rank gradient-based optimization methods have significantly improved memory efficiency during the training of large language models (LLMs), enabling operations within constrained hardware without sacrificing performance. However, these…

In this work, we consider a distributed multi-agent stochastic optimization problem, where each agent holds a local objective function that is smooth and convex, and that is subject to a stochastic process. The goal is for all agents to…

We consider the zeroth-order optimization problem in the huge-scale setting, where the dimension of the problem is so large that performing even basic vector operations on the decision variables is infeasible. In this paper, we propose a…

This paper considers stochastic convex optimization problems with two sets of constraints: (a) deterministic constraints on the domain of the optimization variable, which are difficult to project onto; and (b) deterministic or stochastic…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators…

Human value detection from single sentences is a sparse, imbalanced multi-label task. We study whether Schwartz higher-order (HO) categories help this setting on ValueEval'24 / ValuesML (74K English sentences) under a compute-frugal budget.…

Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…

We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…

One of the major bottlenecks for deploying popular first-order differentially private (DP) machine learning algorithms (e.g., DP-SGD) lies in their high computation and memory cost, despite the existence of optimized implementations.…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables large-language-model fine-tuning without storing backpropagation activations, while LoRA supplies compact trainable adapters. Combining them creates a rank paradox: increasing LoRA rank improves…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning large language models (LLMs). Yet its reliance on a singular reward model often overlooks the diversity of human preferences. Recent approaches address this…

Recently introduced distributed zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) algorithms have shown their utility in distributed reinforcement learning (RL). Unfortunately, in the gradient estimation process, almost all of them require random samples…

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a practical solution for addressing data scarcity challenges by leveraging unlabeled data. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs), pre-trained on massive image-text pairs, have demonstrated…

Derivative-free - or zeroth-order - optimization (DFO) has gained recent attention for its ability to solve problems in a variety of application areas, including machine learning, particularly involving objectives which are stochastic…

This paper introduces a class of model-free feedback methods for solving generic constrained optimization problems where the specific mathematical forms of the objective and constraint functions are not available. The proposed methods,…

The adaptive momentum method (AdaMM), which uses past gradients to update descent directions and learning rates simultaneously, has become one of the most popular first-order optimization methods for solving machine learning problems.…

Robust and stochastic optimal control problem (OCP) formulations allow a systematic treatment of uncertainty, but are typically associated with a high computational cost. The recently proposed zero-order robust optimization (zoRO) algorithm…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a key method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, current offline alignment approaches like DPO, IPO, and SLiC rely heavily on fixed preference…

We devise and evaluate numerically Hybrid High-Order (HHO) methods for hyperelastic materials undergoing finite deformations. The HHO methods use as discrete unknowns piecewise polynomials of order $k\ge1$ on the mesh skeleton, together…