Related papers: Mirror Natural Evolution Strategies
Evolution strategies (ESs) are zeroth-order stochastic black-box optimization heuristics invariant to monotonic transformations of the objective function. They evolve a multivariate normal distribution, from which candidate solutions are…
Zeroth-order (derivative-free) optimization attracts a lot of attention in machine learning, because explicit gradient calculations may be computationally expensive or infeasible. To handle large scale problems both in volume and dimension,…
Information geometry applies concepts in differential geometry to probability and statistics and is especially useful for parameter estimation in exponential families where parameters are known to lie on a Riemannian manifold. Connections…
In this paper, the monotone submodular maximization problem (SM) is studied. SM is to find a subset of size $\kappa$ from a universe of size $n$ that maximizes a monotone submodular objective function $f$. We show using a novel analysis…
In this paper, we consider variants of Newton-MR algorithm for solving unconstrained, smooth, but non-convex optimization problems. Unlike the overwhelming majority of Newton-type methods, which rely on conjugate gradient algorithm as the…
We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…
Any gradient descent optimization requires to choose a learning rate. With deeper and deeper models, tuning that learning rate can easily become tedious and does not necessarily lead to an ideal convergence. We propose a variation of the…
Learning-to-optimize is an emerging framework that seeks to speed up the solution of certain optimization problems by leveraging training data. Learned optimization solvers have been shown to outperform classical optimization algorithms in…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex objective function using an iterative algorithm based on Newton's method and the linear conjugate gradient algorithm, with explicit detection and use of negative curvature directions for the…
We propose \textit{Meta-Regularization}, a novel approach for the adaptive choice of the learning rate in first-order gradient descent methods. Our approach modifies the objective function by adding a regularization term on the learning…
This paper explores a new framework for reinforcement learning based on online convex optimization, in particular mirror descent and related algorithms. Mirror descent can be viewed as an enhanced gradient method, particularly suited to…
Gradient descent is the primary workhorse for optimizing large-scale problems in machine learning. However, its performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. A key limitation of gradient descent is its lack of natural…
Second-order optimization methods are among the most widely used optimization approaches for convex optimization problems, and have recently been used to optimize non-convex optimization problems such as deep learning models. The widely…
We consider the problem of minimization of a convex function on a simple set with convex non-smooth inequality constraint and describe first-order methods to solve such problems in different situations: smooth or non-smooth objective…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…
In this paper, we revisit the problem of private stochastic convex optimization. We propose an algorithm based on noisy mirror descent, which achieves optimal rates both in terms of statistical complexity and number of queries to a…
We propose a new framework for analyzing zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) from the perspective of \emph{oblivious randomized sketching}.In this framework, commonly used gradient estimators in ZOO-such as finite difference (FD) and random…
We propose a communication- and computation-efficient distributed optimization algorithm using second-order information for solving empirical risk minimization (ERM) problems with a nonsmooth regularization term. Our algorithm is applicable…
The Hessian-vector product has been utilized to find a second-order stationary solution with strong complexity guarantee (e.g., almost linear time complexity in the problem's dimensionality). In this paper, we propose to further reduce the…
We present a second order algorithm, based on orthantwise directions, for solving optimization problems involving the sparsity enhancing $\ell_1$-norm. The main idea of our method consists in modifying the descent orthantwise directions by…