Related papers: A Note on Zeroth-Order Optimization on the Simplex
In this paper, we discuss the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: a smooth function plus a non-smooth function. Further, the smooth part can be expressed by the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and…
This paper focuses on the problem of \emph{constrained} \emph{stochastic} optimization. A zeroth order Frank-Wolfe algorithm is proposed, which in addition to the projection-free nature of the vanilla Frank-Wolfe algorithm makes it gradient…
We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
In this paper, we focus on solving an important class of nonconvex optimization problems which includes many problems for example signal processing over a networked multi-agent system and distributed learning over networks. Motivated by…
We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with gradient clipping on convex functions under a generalized smoothness assumption called $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness. Using gradient clipping, we establish a high probability convergence rate that…
We consider a recursive algorithm to construct an aggregated estimator from a finite number of base decision rules in the classification problem. The estimator approximately minimizes a convex risk functional under the l1-constraint. It is…
We propose a novel study of the stochastic proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth. Under suitable assumptions and without requiring any boundedness or control of the variance of the…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
Large language models (LLMs) have brought about significant transformations in human society. Among the crucial computations in LLMs, the softmax unit holds great importance. Its helps the model generating a probability distribution on…
An Adagrad-inspired class of algorithms for smooth unconstrained optimization is presented in which the objective function is never evaluated and yet the gradient norms decrease at least as fast as $\calO(1/\sqrt{k+1})$ while second-order…
We study gradient testing and gradient estimation of smooth functions using only a comparison oracle that, given two points, indicates which one has the larger function value. For any smooth $f\colon\mathbb R^n\to\mathbb R$,…
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…
This paper is devoted to the study of stochastic optimization problems under the generalized smoothness assumption. By considering the unbiased gradient oracle in Stochastic Gradient Descent, we provide strategies to achieve in bounds the…
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…
Particle gradient descent, which uses particles to represent a probability measure and performs gradient descent on particles in parallel, is widely used to optimize functions of probability measures. This paper considers particle gradient…
We consider stochastic gradient estimation using only black-box function evaluations, where the function argument lies within a probability simplex. This problem is motivated from gradient-descent optimization procedures in multiple…
We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite…
In this paper, we propose and analyze algorithms for zeroth-order optimization of non-convex composite objectives, focusing on reducing the complexity dependence on dimensionality. This is achieved by exploiting the low dimensional…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of modern machine learning. Sometimes, there are many different potential gradient estimators that can be used. When so, choosing the one with the best tradeoff between cost and variance is…