Related papers: A Note on Zeroth-Order Optimization on the Simplex
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of finite sums of functions. We propose a simple, yet, practical way to incorporate variance reduction techniques into SignSGD, guaranteeing convergence that is similar to the full sign…
There has been a growing effort in studying the distributed optimization problem over a network. The objective is to optimize a global function formed by a sum of local functions, using only local computation and communication. Literature…
In this letter, an accelerated quadratic programming (QP) algorithm is proposed based on the proximal gradient method. The algorithm can achieve convergence rate $O(1/p^{\alpha})$, where $p$ is the iteration number and $\alpha$ is the given…
In this paper we propose two proximal gradient algorithms for fractional programming problems in real Hilbert spaces, where the numerator is a proper, convex and lower semicontinuous function and the denominator is a smooth function, either…
In this paper, we explore the two-point zeroth-order gradient estimator and identify the distribution of random perturbations that minimizes the estimator's asymptotic variance as the perturbation stepsize tends to zero. We formulate it as…
This letter presents an almost sure convergence of the zeroth-order mirror descent algorithm. The algorithm admits non-smooth convex functions and a biased oracle which only provides noisy function value at any desired point. We approximate…
We introduce a detailed analysis of the convergence of first-order methods with composite noise (sum of relative and absolute) in gradient for convex and smooth function minimization. This paper illustrates instances of practical problems…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…
In machine learning and neural network optimization, algorithms like incremental gradient, and shuffle SGD are popular due to minimizing the number of cache misses and good practical convergence behavior. However, their optimization…
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 problem of minimizing a smooth, Lipschitz, convex function over a compact, convex set using sub-zeroth-order oracles: an oracle that outputs the sign of the directional derivative for a given point and a given direction, an…
This paper addresses black-box smooth optimization problems, where the objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be queried. The main goal of this work is to generate a sequence of feasible points converging…
Locating proximal points is a component of numerous minimization algorithms. This work focuses on developing a method to find the proximal point of a convex function at a point, given an inexact oracle. Our method assumes that exact…
This work is devoted to solving the composite optimization problem with the mixture oracle: for the smooth part of the problem, we have access to the gradient, and for the non-smooth part, only the one-point zero-order oracle is available.…
In this paper, we provide near-optimal accelerated first-order methods for minimizing a broad class of smooth nonconvex functions that are strictly unimodal on all lines through a minimizer. This function class, which we call the class of…
In this paper, we design and analyze a new family of adaptive subgradient methods for solving an important class of weakly convex (possibly nonsmooth) stochastic optimization problems. Adaptive methods that use exponential moving averages…
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 (derivative-free) optimization attracts a lot of attention in machine learning, because explicit gradient calculations may be computationally expensive or infeasible. To handle large scale problems both in volume and dimension,…
We show that the optimal complexity of Nesterov's smooth first-order optimization algorithm is preserved when the gradient is only computed up to a small, uniformly bounded error. In applications of this method to semidefinite programs,…
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for smooth convex optimization assumes that the gradient of the objective function is uniformly smooth with some Lipschitz constant $L$. However, in many settings the…