Related papers: Zeroth-order Optimization for Composite Problems w…
This paper addresses problems of second-order cone programming important in optimization theory and applications. The main attention is paid to the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) for such problems considered in both exact and inexact…
Many important machine learning applications amount to solving minimax optimization problems, and in many cases there is no access to the gradient information, but only the function values. In this paper, we focus on such a gradient-free…
This thesis focuses on developing and analyzing accelerated and inexact first-order methods for solving or finding stationary points of various nonconvex composite optimization (NCO) problems. The main tools mainly come from variational and…
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Yet traditional first-order optimizers such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adam incur prohibitive memory and computational…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
In this paper, we present two novel manifold inexact augmented Lagrangian methods, \textbf{ManIAL} for deterministic settings and \textbf{StoManIAL} for stochastic settings, solving nonsmooth manifold optimization problems. By using the…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has long been favored for its biological plausibility and its capacity to handle non-differentiable objectives, yet its computational complexity has historically limited its application in deep neural…
A broad class of optimization problems can be cast in composite form, that is, considering the minimization of the composition of a lower semicontinuous function with a differentiable mapping. This paper investigates the versatile template…
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…
The paper introduces several new concepts for solving nonconvex or nonsmooth optimization problems, including convertible nonconvex function, exact convertible nonconvex function and differentiable convertible nonconvex function. It is…
We consider the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) as a solver for the fused lasso signal approximator (FLSA) problem. The ALM is a dual method in which squares of the constraint functions are added as penalties to the Lagrangian. In order…
Zeroth-Order optimization presents a promising memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models by relying solely on forward passes. However, its practical adoption is severely constrained by slow wall-clock convergence and…
First-order methods (FOMs) have recently been applied and analyzed for solving problems with complicated functional constraints. Existing works show that FOMs for functional constrained problems have lower-order convergence rates than those…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for nonconvex minimax problems with coupled linear constraints under the deterministic and stochastic settings, which have attracted wide attention in machine learning, signal processing and…
We introduce the concept of strong high-order approximate minimizers for nonconvex optimization problems. These apply in both standard smooth and composite non-smooth settings, and additionally allow convex or inexpensive constraints. An…
We propose a distributed first-order augmented Lagrangian (DFAL) algorithm to minimize the sum of composite convex functions, where each term in the sum is a private cost function belonging to a node, and only nodes connected by an edge can…
The optimal transport (OT) problem and its related problems have attracted significant attention and have been extensively studied in various applications. In this paper, we focus on a class of group-quadratic regularized OT problems which…
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…
We consider the nonsmooth convex composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two finite-sum functions and analyze stochastic compositional variance reduced gradient (SCVRG) methods for them. SCVRG and its…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) algorithms have been recently used to solve black-box or simulation-based learning and control problems, where the gradient of the objective function cannot be easily computed but can be approximated using the…