Related papers: Mirror Natural Evolution Strategies
Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…
Zeroth-order or derivative-free optimization (MeZO) is an attractive strategy for finetuning large language models (LLMs) because it eliminates the memory overhead of backpropagation. However, it converges slowly due to the inherent curse…
Convex and nonconvex finite-sum minimization arises in many scientific computing and machine learning applications. Recently, first-order and second-order methods where objective functions, gradients and Hessians are approximated by…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a gradient-free alternative to first-order (FO) methods by estimating gradients via finite differences of function evaluations, and has recently emerged as a memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning…
We consider max-min and min-max problems with objective functions that are possibly non-smooth, submodular with respect to the minimiser and concave with respect to the maximiser. We investigate the performance of a zeroth-order method…
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.…
Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has been a popular one-shot paradigm for NAS due to its high efficiency. It introduces trainable architecture parameters to represent the importance of candidate operations and proposes…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
Meta-learning has been proposed as a promising machine learning topic in recent years, with important applications to image classification, robotics, computer games, and control systems. In this paper, we study the problem of using…
Many modern machine learning applications, such as multi-task learning, require finding optimal model parameters to trade-off multiple objective functions that may conflict with each other. The notion of the Pareto set allows us to focus on…
Binary optimization, a representative subclass of discrete optimization, plays an important role in mathematical optimization and has various applications in computer vision and machine learning. Usually, binary optimization problems are…
Most existing results about \emph{last-iterate convergence} of learning dynamics are limited to two-player zero-sum games, and only apply under rigid assumptions about what dynamics the players follow. In this paper we provide new results…
We present a novel adaptive optimization algorithm for large-scale machine learning problems. Equipped with a low-cost estimate of local curvature and Lipschitz smoothness, our method dynamically adapts the search direction and step-size.…
Optimization of convex functions under stochastic zeroth-order feedback has been a major and challenging question in online learning. In this work, we consider the problem of optimizing second-order smooth and strongly convex functions…
We study the implicit bias of generic optimization methods, such as mirror descent, natural gradient descent, and steepest descent with respect to different potentials and norms, when optimizing underdetermined linear regression or…
This work concerns the evolutionary approaches to distributed stochastic black-box optimization, in which each worker can individually solve an approximation of the problem with nature-inspired algorithms. We propose a distributed evolution…
We develop an exact coordinate descent algorithm for high-dimensional regularized Huber regression. In contrast to composite gradient descent methods, our algorithm fully exploits the advantages of coordinate descent when the underlying…
We propose adaptive, line search-free second-order methods with optimal rate of convergence for solving convex-concave min-max problems. By means of an adaptive step size, our algorithms feature a simple update rule that requires solving…
We introduce \textit{basic inequalities} for first-order iterative optimization algorithms, forming a simple and versatile framework that connects implicit and explicit regularization. While related inequalities appear in the literature, we…
Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…