Related papers: Imaginary Zeroth-Order Optimization
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…
In many real-world problems, first-order (FO) derivative evaluations are too expensive or even inaccessible. For solving these problems, zeroth-order (ZO) methods that only need function evaluations are often more efficient than FO methods…
Zeroth-order optimization addresses problems where gradient information is inaccessible or impractical to compute. While most existing methods rely on first-order approximations, incorporating second-order (curvature) information can, in…
Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
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…
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…
We introduce a class of first-order methods for smooth constrained optimization that are based on an analogy to non-smooth dynamical systems. Two distinctive features of our approach are that (i) projections or optimizations over the entire…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…
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.…
Motivated by recent increased interest in optimization algorithms for non-convex optimization in application to training deep neural networks and other optimization problems in data analysis, we give an overview of recent theoretical…
We propose and analyze a randomized zeroth-order approach based on approximating the exact gradient byfinite differences computed in a set of orthogonal random directions that changes with each iteration. A number ofpreviously proposed…
In this work, we develop first-order (Hessian-free) and zero-order (derivative-free) implementations of the Cubically regularized Newton method for solving general non-convex optimization problems. For that, we employ finite difference…
We study quantum algorithms based on quantum (sub)gradient estimation using noisy function evaluation oracles, and demonstrate the first dimension-independent query complexities (up to poly-logarithmic factors) for zeroth-order convex…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…
Functionally constrained stochastic optimization problems, where neither the objective function nor the constraint functions are analytically available, arise frequently in machine learning applications. In this work, assuming we only have…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…
Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…
We provide a novel computer-assisted technique for systematically analyzing first-order methods for optimization. In contrast with previous works, the approach is particularly suited for handling sublinear convergence rates and stochastic…