Related papers: Highly Smoothness Zero-Order Methods for Solving O…
In many real-world problems, first-order (FO) derivative evaluations are too expensive or even inaccessible. For solving these problems, zeroth-order (ZO) methods that only need function evaluations are often more efficient than FO methods…
We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…
Due to its applications in many different places in machine learning and other connected engineering applications, the problem of minimization of a smooth function that satisfies the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition receives much attention…
In this paper we propose a generalized condition for a sharp minimum, somewhat similar to the inexact oracle proposed recently by Devolder-Glineur-Nesterov. The proposed approach makes it possible to extend the class of applicability of…
Composite minimization involves a collection of functions which are aggregated in a nonsmooth manner. It covers, as a particular case, smooth approximation of minimax games, minimization of max-type functions, and simple composite…
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 considers stochastic first-order algorithms for minimax optimization under Polyak--{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) conditions. We propose SPIDER-GDA for solving the finite-sum problem of the form $\min_x \max_y f(x,y)\triangleq \frac{1}{n}…
We present two easy-to-implement gradient-free/zeroth-order methods to optimize a stochastic non-smooth function accessible only via a black-box. The methods are built upon efficient first-order methods in the heavy-tailed case, i.e., when…
We study the complexity of finding the global solution to stochastic nonconvex optimization when the objective function satisfies global Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) inequality and the queries from stochastic gradient oracles satisfy mild…
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…
We investigate the convergence properties of a class of iterative algorithms designed to minimize a potentially non-smooth and noisy objective function, which may be algebraically intractable and whose values may be obtained as the output…
In this work we consider unconstrained optimization problems. The objective function is known through a zeroth order stochastic oracle that gives an estimate of the true objective function. To solve these problems, we propose a…
We present a novel gradient-free algorithm to solve a convex stochastic optimization problem, such as those encountered in medicine, physics, and machine learning (e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit problem), where the objective function…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…
Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…
In this short note, we consider the problem of solving a min-max zero-sum game. This problem has been extensively studied in the convex-concave regime where the global solution can be computed efficiently. Recently, there have also been…
This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…
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…
In 1963, Polyak proposed a simple condition that is sufficient to show a global linear convergence rate for gradient descent. This condition is a special case of the \L{}ojasiewicz inequality proposed in the same year, and it does not…
Minimization of a smooth function on a sphere or, more generally, on a smooth manifold, is the simplest non-convex optimization problem. It has a lot of applications. Our goal is to propose a version of the gradient projection algorithm for…