Related papers: Highly Smoothness Zero-Order Methods for Solving O…
We study the local convergence rate of stochastic first-order methods under a local $\alpha$-Polyak-Lojasiewicz ($\alpha$-PL) condition in a neighborhood of a target connected component $\mathcal{M}$ of the local minimizer set. The…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a subset of gradient-free optimization that emerges in many signal processing and machine learning applications. It is used for solving optimization problems similarly to gradient-based methods. However, it…
We tackle robust optimization problems under objective uncertainty in the oracle model, i.e., when the deterministic problem is solved by an oracle. The oracle-based setup is favorable in many situations, e.g., when a compact formulation of…
For safety-critical black-box optimization tasks, observations of the constraints and the objective are often noisy and available only for the feasible points. We propose an approach based on log barriers to find a local solution of a…
In this work, we study optimization specified only through a comparison oracle: given two points, it reports which one is preferred. We call it function-free optimization because we do not assume access to, nor the existence of, a canonical…
Majorization-minimization schemes are a broad class of iterative methods targeting general optimization problems, including nonconvex, nonsmooth and stochastic. These algorithms minimize successively a sequence of upper bounds of the…
We aim to solve a structured convex optimization problem, where a nonsmooth function is composed with a linear operator. When opting for full splitting schemes, usually, primal-dual type methods are employed as they are effective and also…
We study first-order methods (FOMs) for solving \emph{composite nonconvex nonsmooth} optimization with linear constraints. Recently, the lower complexity bounds of FOMs on finding an ($\varepsilon,\varepsilon$)-KKT point of the considered…
We consider the optimization problem of the form $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x) \triangleq \mathbb{E}_{\xi} [F(x; \xi)]$, where the component $F(x;\xi)$ is $L$-mean-squared Lipschitz but possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. The recently…
We introduce a notion of inexact model of a convex objective function, which allows for errors both in the function and in its gradient. For this situation, a gradient method with an adaptive adjustment of some parameters of the model is…
This chapter is devoted to the black-box subgradient algorithms with the minimal requirements for the storage of auxiliary results, which are necessary to execute these algorithms. It starts with the original result of N.Z. Shor which open…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
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…
A fundamental class of matrix optimization problems that arise in many areas of science and engineering is that of quadratic optimization with orthogonality constraints. Such problems can be solved using line-search methods on the Stiefel…
We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…
In this work, we study first-order algorithms for solving Bilevel Optimization (BO) where the objective functions are smooth but possibly nonconvex in both levels and the variables are restricted to closed convex sets. As a first step, we…
We study the problem of zeroth-order (black-box) optimization of a Lipschitz function $f$ defined on a compact subset $\mathcal X$ of $\mathbb R^d$, with the additional constraint that algorithms must certify the accuracy of their…
In the learning to learn (L2L) framework, we cast the design of optimization algorithms as a machine learning problem and use deep neural networks to learn the update rules. In this paper, we extend the L2L framework to zeroth-order (ZO)…
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.…
Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied…