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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

This paper develops and analyzes an accelerated proximal descent method for finding stationary points of nonconvex composite optimization problems. The objective function is of the form $f+h$ where $h$ is a proper closed convex function,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-02 Weiwei Kong

Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Daniel Golovin , John Karro , Greg Kochanski , Chansoo Lee , Xingyou Song , Qiuyi Zhang

In this paper we consider stochastic weakly convex composite problems, however without the existence of a stochastic subgradient oracle. We present a derivative free algorithm that uses a two point approximation for computing a gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-20 V. Kungurtsev , F. Rinaldi

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

In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-15 Xiaopeng Luo , Xin Xu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias

We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-08 Chengchang Liu , Zongqi Wan , Haishan Ye , John C. S. Lui

We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-08 David Kozak , Stephen Becker , Alireza Doostan , Luis Tenorio

We propose and analyze several stochastic gradient algorithms for finding stationary points or local minimum in nonconvex, possibly with nonsmooth regularizer, finite-sum and online optimization problems. First, we propose a simple proximal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Zhize Li , Jian Li

We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-24 Sashank J. Reddi , Suvrit Sra , Barnabas Poczos , Alex Smola

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-20 Anit Kumar Sahu , Manzil Zaheer , Soummya Kar

This paper considers decentralized nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problem with Lipschitz continuous local functions. We propose an efficient stochastic first-order method with client sampling, achieving the $(\delta,\epsilon)$-Goldstein…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-28 Xinyan Chen , Weiguo Gao , Luo Luo

We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-10-27 Guanghui Lan

This paper studies a stochastic algorithm for linearly constrained nonconvex optimization, where the objective function is smooth but only unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded variance are available. We propose a momentum-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-16 Chenyang Qiu , Mihitha Maithripala , Zongli Lin

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

We propose a first order algorithm, a modified version of FISTA, to solve an optimization problem with an objective function that is a sum of a possibly nonconvex function, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a convex function which can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-20 Chee-Khian Sim

We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-26 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Elad Hazan

An algorithm is proposed for solving optimization problems with stochastic objective and deterministic equality and inequality constraints. This algorithm is objective-function-free in the sense that it only uses the objective's gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 S. Gratton , Ph. L. Toint

In this paper, we study a class of stochastic bilevel optimization problems, also known as stochastic simple bilevel optimization, where we minimize a smooth stochastic objective function over the optimal solution set of another stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-16 Jincheng Cao , Ruichen Jiang , Nazanin Abolfazli , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Aryan Mokhtari