Related papers: Continuous-Time Zeroth-Order Dynamics with Project…

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…

Zeroth-order (ZO, also known as derivative-free) methods, which estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, have attracted much attention recently because of its broad applications in machine learning community. The two function…

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…

In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order (FO) optimizers like SGD and Adam has become standard. Yet, as LLMs grow {in size}, the substantial memory…

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,…

This paper investigates the data-driven predictive control problems for a class of continuous-time industrial processes with completely unknown dynamics. The proposed approach employs the data-driven technique to get the system matrices…

Recently, diffusion models have gained popularity and attention in trajectory optimization due to their capability of modeling multi-modal probability distributions. However, addressing nonlinear equality constraints, i.e, dynamic…

Two types of zeroth-order stochastic algorithms have recently been designed for nonconvex optimization respectively based on the first-order techniques SVRG and SARAH/SPIDER. This paper addresses several important issues that are still open…

Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…

This paper addresses constrained smooth saddle-point problems in settings where projection onto the feasible sets is computationally expensive. We bridge the gap between projection-based and projection-free optimization by introducing a…

We revisit the one-point feedback zeroth-order (ZO) optimization problem, a classical setting in derivative-free optimization where only a single noisy function evaluation is available per query. Compared to their two-point counterparts,…

Federated optimization, an emerging paradigm which finds wide real-world applications such as federated learning, enables multiple clients (e.g., edge devices) to collaboratively optimize a global function. The clients do not share their…

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization is pivotal for scenarios where backpropagation is unavailable, such as memory-constrained on-device learning and black-box optimization. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: they are either…

The minimax excess risk optimization (MERO) problem is a new variation of the traditional distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem, which achieves uniformly low regret across all test distributions under suitable conditions. In…

This paper presents an implementation of robust model predictive control (MPC) for collision-free reference trajectory tracking for mobile robots. The presented approach considers the robot motion to be subject to process noise bounded by…

Rank-based zeroth-order (ZO) optimization -- which relies only on the ordering of function evaluations -- offers strong robustness to noise and monotone transformations, and underlies many successful algorithms such as CMA-ES, natural…

In this paper, we present a novel Newton-based extremum seeking controller for the solution of multivariable model-free optimization problems in static maps. Unlike existing asymptotic and fixed-time results in the literature, we present a…

In this paper, we investigate a class of constrained saddle point (SP) problems where the objective function is nonconvex-concave and smooth. This class of problems has wide applicability in machine learning, including robust multi-class…

We present new efficient \textit{projection-free} algorithms for online convex optimization (OCO), where by projection-free we refer to algorithms that avoid computing orthogonal projections onto the feasible set, and instead relay on…

In this paper, we consider a formulation of nonlinear constrained optimization problems. We reformulate it as a time-varying optimization using continuous-time parametric functions and derive a dynamical system for tracking the optimal…