English
Related papers

Related papers: Stochastic Zeroth-order Functional Constrained Opt…

200 papers

We consider the problem of optimizing a high-dimensional convex function using stochastic zeroth-order queries. Under sparsity assumptions on the gradients or function values, we present two algorithms: a successive component/feature…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-27 Yining Wang , Simon Du , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Aarti Singh

We consider the minimization of submodular functions subject to ordering constraints. We show that this optimization problem can be cast as a convex optimization problem on a space of uni-dimensional measures, with ordering constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-31 Francis Bach

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Ruiyang Jin , Yuke Zhou , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Siyang Gao

In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysis Kalogerias

We propose a projection-free conditional gradient-type algorithm for smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions and the constraint set is a closed convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Tesi Xiao , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Saeed Ghadimi

In this paper, we study a class of stochastic and finite-sum convex optimization problems with deterministic constraints. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-$expectedly\ feasible\ stochastic\ optimal$ solution, in which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-26 Zhaosong Lu , Yifeng Xiao

Many convex optimization problems have structured objective function written as a sum of functions with different types of oracles (full gradient, coordinate derivative, stochastic gradient) and different evaluation complexity of these…

In this paper we consider convex optimization problems with stochastic composite objective function subject to (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. The objective function is expressed in terms of expectation operator over a sum…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-03 Ion Necoara , Nitesh Kumar Singh

This contribution examines optimization problems that involve stochastic dominance constraints. These problems have uncountably many constraints. We develop methods to solve the optimization problem by reducing the constraints to a finite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-27 Rajmadan Lakshmanan , Alois Pichler , Miloš Kopa

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-22 Wouter Jongeneel

We initiate the study of nonsmooth optimization problems under bounded local subgradient variation, which postulates bounded difference between (sub)gradients in small local regions around points, in either average or maximum sense. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-05 Jelena Diakonikolas , Cristóbal Guzmán

We propose an enhanced zeroth-order stochastic Frank-Wolfe framework to address constrained finite-sum optimization problems, a structure prevalent in large-scale machine-learning applications. Our method introduces a novel double variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Haishan Ye , Yinghui Huang , Hao Di , Xiangyu Chang

A step-search sequential quadratic programming method is proposed for solving nonlinear equality constrained stochastic optimization problems. It is assumed that constraint function values and derivatives are available, but only stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-08 Albert S. Berahas , Miaolan Xie , Baoyu Zhou

Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-26 Yining Wang , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Aarti Singh

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-02 Mustafa O. Karabag , Cyrus Neary , Ufuk Topcu

Recently, convex nested stochastic composite optimization (NSCO) has received considerable attention for its applications in reinforcement learning and risk-averse optimization. The current NSCO algorithms have worse stochastic oracle…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Zhe Zhang , Guanghui Lan

In this paper, we study nonconvex constrained stochastic zeroth-order optimization problems, for which we have access to exact information of constraints and noisy function values of the objective. We propose a Bregman linearized augmented…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-15 Qiankun Shi , Xiao Wang , Hao Wang

In many practical applications, heuristic or approximation algorithms are used to efficiently solve the task at hand. However their solutions frequently do not satisfy natural monotonicity properties of optimal solutions. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Evangelia Gergatsouli , Brendan Lucier , Christos Tzamos

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Charles Audet , Jean Bigeon , Romain Couderc , Michael Kokkolaras