Related papers: An Optimal Structured Zeroth-order Algorithm for N…
Minimizing finite sums of functions is a central problem in optimization, arising in numerous practical applications. Such problems are commonly addressed using first-order optimization methods. However, these procedures cannot be used in…
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 widely used for zeroth-order optimization in settings where gradient information is unavailable or expensive to compute. These procedures mimic first-order strategies by approximating gradients through function…
We introduce and analyze Structured Stochastic Zeroth order Descent (S-SZD), a finite difference approach that approximates a stochastic gradient on a set of $l\leq d$ orthogonal directions, where $d$ is the dimension of the ambient space.…
Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…
In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…
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 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…
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…
In this study, we consider an optimization problem with uncertainty dependent on decision variables, which has recently attracted attention due to its importance in machine learning and pricing applications. In this problem, the gradient of…
The goal of this paper is to investigate an approach for derivative-free optimization that has not received sufficient attention in the literature and is yet one of the simplest to implement and parallelize. It consists of computing…
The adaptive momentum method (AdaMM), which uses past gradients to update descent directions and learning rates simultaneously, has become one of the most popular first-order optimization methods for solving machine learning problems.…
Non-analytical objectives and constraints often arise in control systems, particularly in problems with complex dynamics, which are challenging yet lack efficient solution methods. In this work, we consider general constrained optimization…
This paper is devoted to the study (common in many applications) of the black-box optimization problem, where the black-box represents a gradient-free oracle $\tilde{f} = f(x) + \xi$ providing the objective function value with some…
Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular optimization tool for the composite and constrained problems in machine learning. However, in many machine learning problems such as black-box attacks and bandit feedback, ADMM…
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…
This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…
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…
A common approach for minimizing a smooth nonlinear function is to employ finite-difference approximations to the gradient. While this can be easily performed when no error is present within the function evaluations, when the function is…
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,…