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Related papers: A Note on Zeroth-Order Optimization on the Simplex

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In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Raghu Bollapragada , Shagun Gupta

Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

In this paper we propose a variant of the random coordinate descent method for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems with composite objective functions. If the smooth part of the objective function has Lipschitz…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-02-14 Ion Necoara , Andrei Patrascu

We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-10-27 Guanghui Lan

In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias

We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-11 Francis Bach , Eric Moulines

Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Elissa Mhanna , Mohamad Assaad

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Michael Muehlebach , Niao He

In this paper we analyze the necessary number of samples to estimate the gradient of any multidimensional smooth (possibly non-convex) function in a zero-order stochastic oracle model. In this model, an estimator has access to noisy values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Abdulrahman Alabdulkareem , Jean Honorio

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-04 Bin Gu , Xiyuan Wei , Hualin Zhang , Yi Chang , Heng Huang

With a weighting scheme proportional to t, a traditional stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm achieves a high probability convergence rate of O({\kappa}/T) for strongly convex functions, instead of O({\kappa} ln(T)/T). We also prove…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-13 Shenghuo Zhu

Consider the problem of minimizing functions that are Lipschitz and strongly convex, but not necessarily differentiable. We prove that after $T$ steps of stochastic gradient descent, the error of the final iterate is $O(\log(T)/T)$ with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-14 Nicholas J. A. Harvey , Christopher Liaw , Yaniv Plan , Sikander Randhawa

The minimization of convex functions which are only available through partial and noisy information is a key methodological problem in many disciplines. In this paper we consider convex optimization with noisy zero-th order information,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Francis Bach , Vianney Perchet

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Alexander Rakhlin , Ohad Shamir , Karthik Sridharan

In this paper, we propose a new way to obtain optimal convergence rates for smooth stochastic (strong) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for optimization tasks where gradients have nonrandom noise. In contrast to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-16 Darina Dvinskikh , Alexander Tyurin , Alexander Gasnikov , Sergey Omelchenko

We address the problem of zero-order optimization from noisy observations for an objective function satisfying the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz or the strong convexity condition. Additionally, we assume that the objective function has an additive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Arya Akhavan , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-16 Ryota Nozawa , Pierre-Louis Poirion , Akiko Takeda

Simplex gradients are an essential feature of many derivative free optimization algorithms, and can be employed, for example, as part of the process of defining a direction of search, or as part of a termination criterion. The calculation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-07-26 Ian Coope , Rachael Tappenden

It is well known that the optimal convergence rate for stochastic optimization of smooth functions is $O(1/\sqrt{T})$, which is same as stochastic optimization of Lipschitz continuous convex functions. This is in contrast to optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-07-30 Mehrdad Mahdavi , Rong Jin

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