Related papers: Zeroth-order Optimization for Composite Problems w…
First-order methods (FOMs) have been widely used for solving large-scale problems. A majority of existing works focus on problems without constraint or with simple constraints. Several recent works have studied FOMs for problems with…
We propose a practical inexact augmented Lagrangian method (iALM) for nonconvex problems with nonlinear constraints. We characterize the total computational complexity of our method subject to a verifiable geometric condition, which is…
First-order methods have been studied for nonlinear constrained optimization within the framework of the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) or penalty method. We propose an improved inexact ALM (iALM) and conduct a unified analysis for…
Safe derivative-free optimization under unknown constraints is a fundamental challenge in modern learning and control. Existing zeroth-order (ZO) methods typically still assume access to a first-order oracle of the constraint functions or…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…
Many real-world problems not only have complicated nonconvex functional constraints but also use a large number of data points. This motivates the design of efficient stochastic methods on finite-sum or expectation constrained problems. In…
Zero-One Composite Optimization (0/1-COP) is a prototype of nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems and it has attracted much attention recently. The augmented Lagrangian Method (ALM) has stood out as a leading methodology for such…
We study first-order methods (FOMs) for solving \emph{composite nonconvex nonsmooth} optimization with linear constraints. Recently, the lower complexity bounds of FOMs on finding an ($\varepsilon,\varepsilon$)-KKT point of the considered…
Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…
Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…
Non-analytical objectives and constraints often arise in control systems, particularly in problems with complex dynamics, which are challenging yet lack efficient solution methods. In this work, we consider general constrained optimization…
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.…
In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…
We address black-box convex optimization problems, where the objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be sampled within the feasible set. The challenge is thus to generate a sequence of feasible points converging…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth function and a composition of a zero-one loss function with a linear operator, namely zero-one composite optimization problem (0/1-COP). It is a versatile model including the support…
Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular optimization tool for the composite and constrained problems in machine learning. However, in many machine learning problems such as black-box attacks and bandit feedback, ADMM…
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…
Zeroth-order optimization methods are developed to overcome the practical hurdle of having knowledge of explicit derivatives. Instead, these schemes work with merely access to noisy functions evaluations. One of the predominant approaches…
In this paper, we study nonconvex constrained stochastic zeroth-order optimization problems, for which we have access to exact information of constraints and noisy function values of the objective. We propose a Bregman linearized augmented…
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…