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We propose Zeroth-Order Random Matrix Search for Learning from Demonstrations (ZORMS-LfD). ZORMS-LfD enables the costs, constraints, and dynamics of constrained optimal control problems, in both continuous and discrete time, to be learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Olivia Dry , Timothy L. Molloy , Wanxin Jin , Iman Shames

In this paper, we propose a new covering technique localized for the trajectories of SGD. This localization provides an algorithm-specific complexity measured by the covering number, which can have dimension-independent cardinality in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-20 Sejun Park , Umut Şimşekli , Murat A. Erdogdu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Daniel Golovin , John Karro , Greg Kochanski , Chansoo Lee , Xingyou Song , Qiuyi Zhang

One of the fundamental challenges in the deep learning community is to theoretically understand how well a deep neural network generalizes to unseen data. However, current approaches often yield generalization bounds that are either too…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Chengli Tan , Jiangshe Zhang , Junmin Liu

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is fundamental for training deep neural networks, especially in non-convex settings. Understanding SGD's generalization properties is crucial for ensuring robust model performance on unseen data. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-24 Wenjun Xiong , Juan Ding , Xinlei Zuo , Qizhai Li

Optimizing noisy functions online, when evaluating the objective requires experiments on a deployed system, is a crucial task arising in manufacturing, robotics and many others. Often, constraints on safe inputs are unknown ahead of time,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-06 Ilnura Usmanova , Yarden As , Maryam Kamgarpour , Andreas Krause

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based methods have been widely used for training large-scale machine learning models that also generalize well in practice. Several explanations have been offered for this generalization performance, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Yikai Zhang , Wenjia Zhang , Sammy Bald , Vamsi Pingali , Chao Chen , Mayank Goswami

In statistical learning theory, generalization error is used to quantify the degree to which a supervised machine learning algorithm may overfit to training data. Recent work [Xu and Raginsky (2017)] has established a bound on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-16 Ankit Pensia , Varun Jog , Po-Ling Loh

We study to what extent may stochastic gradient descent (SGD) be understood as a "conventional" learning rule that achieves generalization performance by obtaining a good fit to training data. We consider the fundamental stochastic convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Tomer Koren , Roi Livni , Yishay Mansour , Uri Sherman

We consider linear prediction with a convex Lipschitz loss, or more generally, stochastic convex optimization problems of generalized linear form, i.e.~where each instantaneous loss is a scalar convex function of a linear function. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Idan Amir , Roi Livni , Nathan Srebro

We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Gergely Neu , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Mahdi Haghifam , Daniel M. Roy

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a central tool in machine learning. We prove that SGD converges to zero loss, even with a fixed (non-vanishing) learning rate - in the special case of homogeneous linear classifiers with smooth monotone…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-19 Mor Shpigel Nacson , Nathan Srebro , Daniel Soudry

Many machine learning tasks can be formulated as Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization (R-ERM), and solved by optimization algorithms such as gradient descent (GD), stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and stochastic variance reduction…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-28 Qi Meng , Yue Wang , Wei Chen , Taifeng Wang , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

While momentum-based methods, in conjunction with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Ashish Khisti , Ben Liang

We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Taha El Bakkali , El Mahdi Chayti , Qiuyi Zhang , Imane Rahali , Omar Saadi

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-29 Runyu Zhang , Gioele Zardini , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Na Li

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

Interest in stochastic zeroth-order (SZO) methods has recently been revived in black-box optimization scenarios such as adversarial black-box attacks to deep neural networks. SZO methods only require the ability to evaluate the objective…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Mayumi Ohta , Nathaniel Berger , Artem Sokolov , Stefan Riezler

This paper presents a new generalization error analysis for Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent (D-SGD) based on algorithmic stability. The obtained results overhaul a series of recent works that suggested an increased instability due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Batiste Le Bars , Aurélien Bellet , Marc Tommasi , Kevin Scaman , Giovanni Neglia

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