Related papers: StepDIRECT -- A Derivative-Free Optimization Metho…
Selecting an effective step-size is a fundamental challenge in first-order optimization, especially for problems with non-Euclidean geometries. This paper presents a novel adaptive step-size strategy for optimization algorithms that rely on…
Optical computing holds promise for high-speed, energy-efficient information processing, with diffractive optical networks emerging as a flexible platform for implementing task-specific transformations. A challenge, however, is the…
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…
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…
Decision-focused learning (DFL) offers an end-to-end approach to the predict-then-optimize (PO) framework by training predictive models directly on decision loss (DL), enhancing decision-making performance within PO contexts. However, the…
The objective of trajectory optimization algorithms is to achieve an optimal collision-free path between a start and goal state. In real-world scenarios where environments can be complex and non-homogeneous, a robot needs to be able to…
Dynamic Threshold Optimization (DTO) adaptively "compresses" the decision space (DS) in a global search and optimization problem by bounding the objective function from below. This approach is different from "shrinking" DS by reducing…
Recently, numerous preference optimization algorithms have been introduced as extensions to the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) family. While these methods have successfully aligned models with human preferences, there is a lack of…
We consider the optimization problem of the form $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x) \triangleq \mathbb{E}_{\xi} [F(x; \xi)]$, where the component $F(x;\xi)$ is $L$-mean-squared Lipschitz but possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. The recently…
To tackle the exponentiality associated with NP-hard problems, two paradigms have been proposed. First, Branch & Bound, like Dynamic Programming, achieve efficient exact inference but requires extensive information and analysis about the…
Finding a local minimum or maximum of a function is often achieved through the gradient-descent optimization method. For a function in dimension d, the gradient requires to compute at each step d partial derivatives. This method is for…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
Many real-world optimization problems contain parameters that are unknown before deployment time, either due to stochasticity or to lack of information (e.g., demand or travel times in delivery problems). A common strategy in such cases is…
We consider unconstrained randomized optimization of convex objective functions. We analyze the Random Pursuit algorithm, which iteratively computes an approximate solution to the optimization problem by repeated optimization over a…
The paper considers distributed gradient flow (DGF) for multi-agent nonconvex optimization. DGF is a continuous-time approximation of distributed gradient descent that is often easier to study than its discrete-time counterpart. The paper…
For solving pseudo-convex global optimization problems, we present a novel fully adaptive steepest descent method (or ASDM) without any hard-to-estimate parameters. For the step-size regulation in an $\varepsilon$-normalized direction, we…
Dynamic Optimization Problems (DOPs) are challenging to address due to their complex nature, i.e., dynamic environment variation. Evolutionary Computation methods are generally advantaged in solving DOPs since they resemble dynamic…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
Evolutionary algorithms, such as Differential Evolution, excel in solving real-parameter optimization challenges. However, the effectiveness of a single algorithm varies across different problem instances, necessitating considerable efforts…
This work tackles a class of optimization problems in which fixing some well-chosen combinations of the variables makes the problem substantially easier to solve. We consider that the variables space may be partitioned into subsets that fix…