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We study the problem of finding an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point (FOSP) of a smooth function, given access only to gradient information. The best-known gradient query complexity for this task, assuming both the gradient and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-04 Ruichen Jiang , Aryan Mokhtari , Francisco Patitucci

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

This paper considers constrained stochastic nonsmooth minimax optimization problem of the form…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Jinyang Shi , Luo Luo

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Albert S. Berahas , Frank E. Curtis , Lara Zebiane

We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_\star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-29 Hilal Asi , Yair Carmon , Arun Jambulapati , Yujia Jin , Aaron Sidford

In recent years, nonconvex minimax problems have attracted significant attention due to their broad applications in machine learning, including generative adversarial networks, robust optimization and adversarial training. Most existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-06 Yan Gao , Yongchao Liu

We propose a new first-order method for minimizing nonconvex functions with a Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian. The proposed method is an accelerated gradient descent with two restart mechanisms and finds a solution where the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-19 Naoki Marumo , Akiko Takeda

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-14 Raghu Bollapragada , Cem Karamanli

Using double-smoothing technique and stochastic mirror descent with inexact oracle we built an optimal algorithm (up to a multiplicative factor) for two-points gradient-free non-smooth stochastic convex programming. We investigate how much…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-15 Anastasia Bayandina , Alexander Gasnikov , Fariman Guliev , Anastasia Lagunovskaya

Many important machine learning applications amount to solving minimax optimization problems, and in many cases there is no access to the gradient information, but only the function values. In this paper, we focus on such a gradient-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Tengyu Xu , Zhe Wang , Yingbin Liang , H. Vincent Poor

We consider non-smooth saddle point optimization problems. To solve these problems, we propose a zeroth-order method under bounded or Lipschitz continuous noise, possible adversarial. In contrast to the state-of-the-art algorithms, our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-28 Darina Dvinskikh , Vladislav Tominin , Yaroslav Tominin , Alexander Gasnikov

This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-10 Huaiyi Mu , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Zhongkui Li

Gradient-based minimax optimal algorithms have greatly promoted the development of continuous optimization and machine learning. One seminal work due to Yurii Nesterov [Nes83a] established $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{L/\mu})$ gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Yuanshi Liu , Hanzhen Zhao , Yang Xu , Pengyun Yue , Cong Fang

This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Anik Kumar Paul , Shalabh Bhatnagar

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-06 Zhongruo Wang , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma , Meisam Razaviyayn

We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given quantum access to a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-07-26 Aaron Sidford , Chenyi Zhang

We consider nonconvex-concave minimax optimization problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y\in{\mathcal Y}} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, where $f$ is strongly-concave in $\bf y$ but possibly nonconvex in $\bf x$ and ${\mathcal Y}$ is a convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Luo Luo , Haishan Ye , Zhichao Huang , Tong Zhang

Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-19 Feihu Huang , Bin Gu , Zhouyuan Huo , Songcan Chen , Heng Huang

We study unconstrained optimization problems of nonsmooth, nonconvex Lipschitz functions, using only noisy pairwise comparisons governed by a known link function. Our goal is to compute a $(\delta,\varepsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Taha El Bakkali , El Mahdi Chayti , Omar Saadi

We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-22 Eduard Gorbunov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov