Related papers: A gradient estimator via L1-randomization for onli…
We investigate the finite-time analysis of finding ($\delta,\epsilon$)-stationary points for nonsmooth nonconvex objectives in decentralized stochastic optimization. A set of agents aim at minimizing a global function using only their local…
Online Learning to Rank (OL2R) algorithms learn from implicit user feedback on the fly. The key of such algorithms is an unbiased estimation of gradients, which is often (trivially) achieved by uniformly sampling from the entire parameter…
We propose novel optimal and parameter-free algorithms for computing an approximate solution with small (projected) gradient norm. Specifically, for computing an approximate solution such that the norm of its (projected) gradient does not…
In this paper, we leverage an information-theoretic upper bound on the maximum admissible level of noise (MALN) in convex Lipschitz-continuous zeroth-order optimisation to establish corresponding upper bounds for classes of strongly convex…
This paper studies high-order evaluation complexity for partially separable convexly-constrained optimization involving non-Lipschitzian group sparsity terms in a nonconvex objective function. We propose a partially separable adaptive…
In this paper, we consider the optimisation of time varying functions by a network of agents with no gradient information. The proposed a novel method to estimate the gradient at each agent's position using only neighbour information. The…
We aim to design adaptive online learning algorithms that take advantage of any special structure that might be present in the learning task at hand, with as little manual tuning by the user as possible. A fundamental obstacle that comes up…
We describe a primal-dual framework for the design and analysis of online convex optimization algorithms for {\em drifting regret}. Existing literature shows (nearly) optimal drifting regret bounds only for the $\ell_2$ and the…
This paper investigates online algorithms for smooth time-varying optimization problems, focusing first on methods with constant step-size, momentum, and extrapolation-length. Assuming strong convexity, precise results for the tracking…
In this paper, our aim is to analyse the generalization capabilities of first-order methods for statistical learning in multiple, different yet related, scenarios including supervised learning, transfer learning, robust learning and…
We propose an adaptive zeroth-order method for minimizing differentiable functions with $L$-Lipschitz continuous gradients. The method is designed to take advantage of the eventual compressibility of the gradient of the objective function,…
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…
Learning policies from fixed offline datasets is a key challenge to scale up reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms towards practical applications. This is often because off-policy RL algorithms suffer from distributional shift, due to…
This review presents modern gradient-free methods to solve convex optimization problems. By gradient-free methods, we mean those that use only (noisy) realizations of the objective value. We are motivated by various applications where…
We develop parameter-free algorithms for unconstrained online learning with regret guarantees that scale with the gradient variation $V_T(u) = \sum_{t=2}^T \|\nabla f_t(u)-\nabla f_{t-1}(u)\|^2$. For $L$-smooth convex loss, we provide…
In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…
Online bilevel optimization (OBO) is a powerful framework for machine learning problems where both outer and inner objectives evolve over time, requiring dynamic updates. Current OBO approaches rely on deterministic \textit{window-smoothed}…
Sign-based stochastic methods have gained attention due to their ability to achieve robust performance despite using only the sign information for parameter updates. However, the current convergence analysis of sign-based methods relies on…
In this paper we propose a general framework to characterize and solve the stochastic optimization problems with multiple objectives underlying many real world learning applications. We first propose a projection based algorithm which…
We propose a new first-order method for minimizing nonconvex functions with Lipschitz continuous gradients and H\"older continuous Hessians. The proposed algorithm is a heavy-ball method equipped with two particular restart mechanisms. It…