Related papers: Zeroth-Order Stochastic Coordinate Methods for Dec…
This paper investigates how to accelerate the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on nonconvex problems with zeroth-order information available only. We propose a zeroth-order (ZO) distributed primal-dual stochastic…
This letter studies distributed stochastic optimization over a peer-to-peer network when agents can query only zeroth-order function values. We propose ZOOM-PB, a coordinate-sampling distributed zeroth-order method equipped with a…
This paper investigates the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by the summation of $n$ local cost functions. We solve such a problem by involving zeroth-order (ZO) information…
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…
In this paper, we consider a distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problem, which is about minimizing a sum of $n$ local cost functions over a network with only zeroth-order information. A novel single-loop Decentralized…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…
In this paper, we consider a stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem with the cost function being distributed over $n$ agents having access only to zeroth-order (ZO) information of the cost. This problem has various machine…
This paper studies a compressed momentum-based single-point zeroth-order algorithm for stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization, aiming to alleviate communication overhead and address the unavailability of explicit gradient…
We study (constrained) nonconvex (composite) optimization problems where the decision variables vector can be split into blocks of variables. Random block projection is a popular technique to handle this kind of problem for its remarkable…
Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…
In the paper, we propose a class of accelerated zeroth-order and first-order momentum methods for both nonconvex mini-optimization and minimax-optimization. Specifically, we propose a new accelerated zeroth-order momentum (Acc-ZOM) method…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…
This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…
This paper considers zeroth-order optimization for stochastic convex minimization problem. We propose a parameter-free stochastic zeroth-order method (POEM) by introducing a step-size scheme based on the distance over finite difference and…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…
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 studies the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem over a network of agents, where agents only access stochastic zeroth-order information about their local cost functions and collaboratively optimize the global…
We consider decentralized stochastic convex optimization on connected network, in which gradients of agents are unavailable and each agent can query only noisy function values of its own local objective. The goal is to minimize the average…
This paper considers a consensus optimization problem, where all the nodes in a network, with access to the zeroth-order information of its local objective function only, attempt to cooperatively achieve a common minimizer of the sum of…
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…