Related papers: An Empirical Evaluation of Zeroth-Order Optimizati…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is widely used to handle challenging tasks, such as query-based black-box adversarial attacks and reinforcement learning. Various attempts have been made to integrate prior information into the gradient…
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…
Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…
Modern machine learning algorithms usually involve tuning multiple (from one to thousands) hyperparameters which play a pivotal role in terms of model generalizability. Black-box optimization and gradient-based algorithms are two dominant…
Molecular discovery has brought great benefits to the chemical industry. Various molecule design techniques are developed to identify molecules with desirable properties. Traditional optimization methods, such as genetic algorithms,…
Differentially private zeroth-order optimization methods have recently gained popularity in private fine tuning of machine learning models due to their reduced memory requirements. Current approaches for privatizing zeroth-order methods…
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…
In this work we address the problem of convex optimization in a multi-agent setting where the objective is to minimize the mean of local cost functions whose derivatives are not available (e.g. black-box models). Moreover agents can only…
A major challenge of applying zeroth-order (ZO) methods is the high query complexity, especially when queries are costly. We propose a novel gradient estimation technique for ZO methods based on adaptive lazy queries that we term as LAZO.…
In the paper, we propose a class of accelerated zeroth-order and first-order momentum methods for both nonconvex mini-optimization and minimax-optimization. Specifically, we propose a new accelerated zeroth-order momentum (Acc-ZOM) method…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) algorithms have been recently used to solve black-box or simulation-based learning and control problems, where the gradient of the objective function cannot be easily computed but can be approximated using the…
Molecular optimization is a fundamental goal in the chemical sciences and is of central interest to drug and material design. In recent years, significant progress has been made in solving challenging problems across various aspects of…
Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…
Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has demonstrated success in a wide array of downstream tasks. However, as LMs are scaled up, the memory requirements for backpropagation become prohibitively high. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods can…
In this letter, we first propose a \underline{Z}eroth-\underline{O}rder c\underline{O}ordinate \underline{M}ethod~(ZOOM) to solve the stochastic optimization problem over a decentralized network with only zeroth-order~(ZO) oracle feedback…
First-order methods for solving convex optimization problems have been at the forefront of mathematical optimization in the last 20 years. The rapid development of this important class of algorithms is motivated by the success stories…
Despite the great achievements of the modern deep neural networks (DNNs), the vulnerability/robustness of state-of-the-art DNNs raises security concerns in many application domains requiring high reliability. Various adversarial attacks are…
Efficient optimization of molecules with targeted properties remains a significant challenge due to the vast size and discrete nature of chemical compound space. Conventional machine-learning-based optimization approaches typically require…
We investigate the effectiveness of adaptive zeroth-order (ZO) optimization for memory-constrained fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Contrary to prior claims, we show that adaptive ZO methods such as ZO-Adam offer no convergence…
Large language models (LLMs) excel across various tasks, but standard first-order (FO) fine-tuning demands considerable memory, significantly limiting real-world deployment. Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization stood out as a promising…