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Related papers: Gradient is All You Need? How Consensus-Based Opti…

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Consensus-based optimization (CBO) has established itself as an efficient gradient-free optimization scheme, with attractive mathematical properties, such as mean-field convergence results for non-convex loss functions. In this work, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Tim Roith , Leon Bungert , Philipp Wacker

This paper introduces an interacting-particle optimization method tailored to possibly non-convex composite optimization problems, which arise widely in signal processing. The proposed method, \emph{ProxiCBO}, integrates consensus-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-20 Haoyu Zhang , Yanting Ma , Ruangrawee Kitichotkul , Joshua Rapp , Petros Boufounos

Iterative optimization is central to modern artificial intelligence (AI) and provides a crucial framework for understanding adaptive systems. This review provides a unified perspective on this subject, bridging classic theory with neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jesús García Fernández , Nasir Ahmad , Marcel van Gerven

Many machine learning tasks can be formulated as a stochastic compositional optimization (SCO) problem such as reinforcement learning, AUC maximization, and meta-learning, where the objective function involves a nested composition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Ming Yang , Xiyuan Wei , Tianbao Yang , Yiming Ying

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-03 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante , Ebisa Wollega

Stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) has been integrated into many machine learning paradigms recently, including hyperparameter optimization, meta learning, and reinforcement learning. Along with the wide range of applications, there have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Xuelin Zhang , Hong Chen , Bin Gu , Tieliang Gong , Feng Zheng

Federated learning is an important framework in modern machine learning that seeks to integrate the training of learning models from multiple users, each user having their own local data set, in a way that is sensitive to data privacy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Jose A. Carrillo , Nicolas Garcia Trillos , Sixu Li , Yuhua Zhu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Azar Louzi

Objective functions in large-scale machine-learning and artificial intelligence applications often live in high dimensions with strong non-convexity and massive local minima. First-order methods, such as the stochastic gradient method and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-10 Jingrun Chen , Shi Jin , Liyao Lyu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Yunwen Lei , Ting Hu , Guiying Li , Ke Tang

This paper studies a class of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO) models featuring an additional stochastic rate of information, modeling the agents' knowledge of the environment and energy landscape. The well-posedness of the stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-29 Stefano Almi , Alessandro Baldi , Marco Morandotti , Francesco Solombrino

Zero-order optimization has recently received significant attention for designing optimal trajectories and policies for robotic systems. However, most existing methods (e.g., MPPI, CEM, and CMA-ES) are local in nature, as they rely on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Xudong Sun , Armand Jordana , Massimo Fornasier , Jalal Etesami , Majid Khadiv

The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Naoki Sato , Hideaki Iiduka

We present stochastic consensus and convergence of the discrete consensus-based optimization (CBO) algorithm with random batch interactions and heterogeneous external noises. Despite the wide applications and successful performance in many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-02 Dongnam Ko , Seung-Yeal Ha , Shi Jin , Doheon Kim

Lately, a novel swarm intelligence model, namely the consensus-based optimization (CBO) algorithm, was introduced to deal with the global optimization problems. Limited by the conditions of Ito's formula, the convergence analysis of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-14 Jiazhen Wei , Wei Bian

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Jie Chen , Ronny Luss

We systematically develop a learning-based treatment of stochastic optimal control (SOC), relying on direct optimization of parametric control policies. We propose a derivation of adjoint sensitivity results for stochastic differential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Stefano Massaroli , Michael Poli , Stefano Peluchetti , Jinkyoo Park , Atsushi Yamashita , Hajime Asama

We develop universal gradient methods for Stochastic Convex Optimization (SCO). Our algorithms automatically adapt not only to the oracle's noise but also to the H\"older smoothness of the objective function without a priori knowledge of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-12 Anton Rodomanov , Ali Kavis , Yongtao Wu , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher

Introduced in 2017 \cite{B1-pinnau2017consensus}, Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO) has rapidly emerged as a significant breakthrough in global optimization. This straightforward yet powerful multi-particle, zero-order optimization method…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-05-29 Massimo Fornasier , Lukang Sun

Gradient Descent (GD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for finding the optimal solution to an optimization problem. For reduced computational complexity, the optimal solution $\mathrm{x^*}$ of the optimization problem must be attained in a minimum…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-01 Revati Gunjal , Sushama Wagh , Syed Shadab Nayyer , Alex Stankovic , Navdeep M. Singh