Related papers: OFFO minimization algorithms for second-order opti…
It is well known that both gradient descent and stochastic coordinate descent achieve a global convergence rate of $O(1/k)$ in the objective value, when applied to a scheme for minimizing a Lipschitz-continuously differentiable,…
We focus on analyzing the classical stochastic projected gradient methods under a general dependent data sampling scheme for constrained smooth nonconvex optimization. We show the worst-case rate of convergence $\tilde{O}(t^{-1/4})$ and…
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…
Arising in semi-parametric statistics, control applications, and as sub-problems in global optimization methods, certain optimization problems can have objective functions requiring numerical integration to evaluate, yet gradient function…
We consider the optimization of a quadratic objective function whose gradients are only accessible through a stochastic oracle that returns the gradient at any given point plus a zero-mean finite variance random error. We present the first…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…
This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…
Classic zeroth-order optimization approaches typically optimize for a smoothed version of the original function, i.e., the expected objective under randomly perturbed model parameters. This can be interpreted as encouraging the loss values…
Constrained second-order convex optimization algorithms are the method of choice when a high accuracy solution to a problem is needed, due to their local quadratic convergence. These algorithms require the solution of a constrained…
We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has…
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…
This paper gives a unified and succinct approach to the $O(1/\sqrt{k}), O(1/k),$ and $O(1/k^2)$ convergence rates of the subgradient, gradient, and accelerated gradient methods for unconstrained convex minimization. In the three cases the…
This work studies minimization problems with zero-order noisy oracle information under the assumption that the objective function is highly smooth and possibly satisfies additional properties. We consider two kinds of zero-order projected…
We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…
A class of second-order algorithms is proposed for minimizing smooth nonconvex functions that alternates between regularized Newton and negative curvature steps in an iteration-dependent subspace. In most cases, the Hessian matrix is…
This paper proposes a novel proximal-gradient algorithm for a decentralized optimization problem with a composite objective containing smooth and non-smooth terms. Specifically, the smooth and nonsmooth terms are dealt with by gradient and…
Gradient descent and its variants are widely used in machine learning. However, oracle access of gradient may not be available in many applications, limiting the direct use of gradient descent. This paper proposes a method of estimating…
One of the most effective algorithms for differentially private learning and optimization is objective perturbation. This technique augments a given optimization problem (e.g. deriving from an ERM problem) with a random linear term, and…
The dual challenges of prohibitive communication overhead and the impracticality of gradient computation due to data privacy or black-box constraints in distributed systems motivate this work on communication-constrained gradient-free…
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…