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Many recent studies on first-order methods (FOMs) focus on \emph{composite non-convex non-smooth} optimization with linear and/or nonlinear function constraints. Upper (or worst-case) complexity bounds have been established for these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-14 Wei Liu , Qihang Lin , Yangyang Xu

Second-order methods, which utilize gradients as well as Hessians to optimize a given function, are of major importance in mathematical optimization. In this work, we prove tight bounds on the oracle complexity of such methods for smooth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-18 Yossi Arjevani , Ohad Shamir , Ron Shiff

We develop algorithms for the optimization of convex objectives that have H\"older continuous $q$-th derivatives by using a $q$-th order oracle, for any $q \geq 1$. Our algorithms work for general norms under mild conditions, including the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-07 Juan Pablo Contreras , Cristóbal Guzmán , David Martínez-Rubio

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-22 Wouter Jongeneel

We study convex composite optimization problems, where the objective function is given by the sum of a prox-friendly function and a convex function whose subgradients are estimated under heavy-tailed noise. Existing work often employs…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Chuan He , Zhaosong Lu

Given any algorithm for convex optimization that uses exact first-order information (i.e., function values and subgradients), we show how to use such an algorithm to solve the problem with access to inexact first-order information. This is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Phillip Kerger , Marco Molinaro , Hongyi Jiang , Amitabh Basu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Aleksandr Lobanov , Nail Bashirov , Alexander Gasnikov

In this paper, we study the fundamental open question of finding the optimal high-order algorithm for solving smooth convex minimization problems. Arjevani et al. (2019) established the lower bound $\Omega\left(\epsilon^{-2/(3p+1)}\right)$…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-20 Dmitry Kovalev , Alexander Gasnikov

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…

In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysis Kalogerias

This paper offers a matrix-free first-order numerical method to solve large-scale conic optimization problems. Solving systems of linear equations pose the most computationally challenging part in both first-order and second-order numerical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-11 Muhammad Adil , Ramtin Madani , Sasan Tavakkol , Ali Davoudi

We present two first-order, sequential optimization algorithms to solve constrained optimization problems. We consider a black-box setting with a priori unknown, non-convex objective and constraint functions that have Lipschitz continuous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-19 Abraham P. Vinod , Arie Israel , Ufuk Topcu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-22 Zichong Li , Pin-Yu Chen , Sijia Liu , Songtao Lu , Yangyang Xu

Many convex optimization problems have structured objective function written as a sum of functions with different types of oracles (full gradient, coordinate derivative, stochastic gradient) and different evaluation complexity of these…

First-order methods for minimization and saddle point (min-max) problems are widely used for solving large-scale problems, in particular arising in machine learning. The majority of works obtain favorable complexity guarantees of such…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Arya Akhavan , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Ziyi Chen , Peiran Yu , Heng Huang

In this work, we consider bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent works show that with a Hessian-vector product (HVP) oracle, one can provably find an $\epsilon$-stationary point within…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Lesi Chen , Yaohua Ma , Jingzhao Zhang

Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Marco Rando , Cesare Molinari , Lorenzo Rosasco , Silvia Villa

Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-17 Zhichao Jia , Benjamin Grimmer