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Gradient-based optimization is now ubiquitous across graphics, but unfortunately can not be applied to problems with undefined or zero gradients. To circumvent this issue, the loss function can be manually replaced by a ``surrogate'' that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Michael Fischer , Tobias Ritschel

In recent years, multi-objective optimization (MOO) emerges as a foundational problem underpinning many multi-agent multi-task learning applications. However, existing algorithms in MOO literature remain limited to centralized learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Haibo Yang , Zhuqing Liu , Jia Liu , Chaosheng Dong , Michinari Momma

Offline optimization is an emerging problem in many experimental engineering domains including protein, drug or aircraft design, where online experimentation to collect evaluation data is too expensive or dangerous. To avoid that, one has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Yassine Chemingui , Aryan Deshwal , Trong Nghia Hoang , Janardhan Rao Doppa

Federated learning is a distributed learning framework that allows a set of clients to collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server, without sharing raw data samples. Although in many practical scenarios the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-02 Alessio Maritan , Subhrakanti Dey , Luca Schenato

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Haishan Ye , Luo Luo

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Elissa Mhanna , Mohamad Assaad

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-04 Bin Gu , Xiyuan Wei , Hualin Zhang , Yi Chang , Heng Huang

As an emerging technology, federated learning (FL) involves training machine learning models over distributed edge devices, which attracts sustained attention and has been extensively studied. However, the heterogeneity of client data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Hao Zhang , Tingting Wu , Siyao Cheng , Jie Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yicheng Lang , Changsheng Wang , Yihua Zhang , Mingyi Hong , Zheng Zhang , Wotao Yin , Sijia Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Bhavya Kailkhura , Gaoyuan Zhang , Alfred Hero , Pramod K. Varshney

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-20 HanQin Cai , Daniel Mckenzie , Wotao Yin , Zhenliang Zhang

Federated learning is a machine learning approach where multiple devices collaboratively learn with the help of a parameter server by sharing only their local updates. While gradient-based optimization techniques are widely adopted in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Ahmed Elbakary , Chaouki Ben Issaid , Mohammad Shehab , Karim Seddik , Tamer ElBatt , Mehdi Bennis

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) attracts increasing attention because it empowers multiple parties to jointly train a privacy-preserving model over vertically partitioned data. Recent research has shown that applying zeroth-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Ganyu Wang , Qingsong Zhang , Li Xiang , Boyu Wang , Bin Gu , Charles Ling

We consider minimizing functions for which it is expensive to compute the (possibly stochastic) gradient. Such functions are prevalent in reinforcement learning, imitation learning and adversarial training. Our target optimization framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Jonathan Wilder Lavington , Sharan Vaswani , Reza Babanezhad , Mark Schmidt , Nicolas Le Roux

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is widely used to handle challenging tasks, such as query-based black-box adversarial attacks and reinforcement learning. Various attempts have been made to integrate prior information into the gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-09 Shuyu Cheng , Guoqiang Wu , Jun Zhu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Ruiyang Jin , Yuke Zhou , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Siyang Gao

Many applications in machine learning require optimizing a function whose true gradient is unknown, but where surrogate gradient information (directions that may be correlated with, but not necessarily identical to, the true gradient) is…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Niru Maheswaranathan , Luke Metz , George Tucker , Dami Choi , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Comparison-Based Optimization (CBO) is an optimization paradigm that assumes only very limited access to the objective function f(x). Despite the growing relevance of CBO to real-world applications, this field has received little attention…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Isha Slavin , Daniel McKenzie

Federated learning (FL) is a promising learning paradigm that can tackle the increasingly prominent isolated data islands problem while keeping users' data locally with privacy and security guarantees. However, FL could result in…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Peng Yang , Yuning Jiang , Ting Wang , Yong Zhou , Yuanming Shi , Colin N. Jones

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-22 Pranay Sharma , Kaidi Xu , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xue Lin , Pramod K. Varshney