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This paper investigates how to accelerate the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on nonconvex problems with zeroth-order information available only. We propose a zeroth-order (ZO) distributed primal-dual stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-15 Shengjun Zhang , Colleen P. Bailey

We study the problem of distributed zero-order optimization for a class of strongly convex functions. They are formed by the average of local objectives, associated to different nodes in a prescribed network of connections. We propose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-29 Arya Akhavan , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Elissa Mhanna , Mohamad Assaad

Distributed multi-agent optimization finds many applications in distributed learning, control, estimation, etc. Most existing algorithms assume knowledge of first-order information of the objective and have been analyzed for convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-17 Yujie Tang , Junshan Zhang , Na Li

This paper focuses on a multi-agent zeroth-order online optimization problem in a federated learning setting for target tracking. The agents only sense their current distances to their targets and aim to maintain a minimum safe distance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Ege C. Kaya , M. Berk Sahin , Abolfazl Hashemi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-09 Yao Shu , Xiaoqiang Lin , Zhongxiang Dai , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Sihwan Park , Jihun Yun , SungYub Kim , Souvik Kundu , Eunho Yang

This paper studies a distributed multi-agent convex optimization problem. The system comprises multiple agents in this problem, each with a set of local data points and an associated local cost function. The agents are connected to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-20 Kushal Chakrabarti , Nirupam Gupta , Nikhil Chopra

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-20 HanQin Cai , Daniel Mckenzie , Wotao Yin , Zhenliang Zhang

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Haishan Ye , Luo Luo

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is widely used for solving black-box optimization and control problems. In particular, single-point ZO (SZO) is well-suited to online or dynamic problem settings due to its requirement of only a single…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Xin Chen , Zhaolin Ren

Distributed learning and adaptation have received significant interest and found wide-ranging applications in machine learning and signal processing. While various approaches, such as shared-memory optimization, multi-task learning, and…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-03 Pourya Behmandpoor , Marc Moonen , Panagiotis Patrinos

Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Wanli Shi , Hongchang Gao , Bin Gu

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

In this paper, we focus on solving a distributed convex optimization problem in a network, where each agent has its own convex cost function and the goal is to minimize the sum of the agents' cost functions while obeying the network…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-02 Shi Pu , Wei Shi , Jinming Xu , Angelia Nedić

In this paper, we focus on solving an important class of nonconvex optimization problems which includes many problems for example signal processing over a networked multi-agent system and distributed learning over networks. Motivated by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-25 Ehsan Kazemi , Liqiang Wang

This paper presents a special type of distributed optimization problems, where the summation of agents' local cost functions (i.e., global cost function) is convex, but each individual can be non-convex. Unlike most distributed optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-16 Yipeng Pang , Guoqiang Hu

Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Shaocong Ma , Heng Huang

In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Aleksandr Lobanov , Nail Bashirov , Alexander Gasnikov

We propose a new framework for analyzing zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) from the perspective of \emph{oblivious randomized sketching}.In this framework, commonly used gradient estimators in ZOO-such as finite difference (FD) and random…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Haishan Ye , Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen