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Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
Black-box global optimization aims at minimizing an objective function whose analytical form is not known. To do so, many state-of-the-art methods rely on sampling-based strategies, where sampling distributions are built in an iterative…
In this work, we study first-order algorithms for solving Bilevel Optimization (BO) where the objective functions are smooth but possibly nonconvex in both levels and the variables are restricted to closed convex sets. As a first step, we…
Metaheuristic algorithms are powerful tools for global optimization, particularly for non-convex and non-differentiable problems where exact methods are often impractical. Particle-based optimization methods, inspired by swarm intelligence…
Many real world scientific and industrial applications require optimizing multiple competing black-box objectives. When the objectives are expensive-to-evaluate, multi-objective Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach because of…
We study the problem of performance optimization of closed-loop control systems with unmodeled dynamics. Bayesian optimization (BO) has been demonstrated to be effective for improving closed-loop performance by automatically tuning…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is an efficient framework for solving black-box optimization problems with expensive function evaluations. This paper addresses the BO problem setting for combinatorial spaces (e.g., sequences and graphs) that…
Block coordinate descent (BCD) methods are prevalent in large scale optimization problems due to the low memory and computational costs per iteration, the predisposition to parallelization, and the ability to exploit the structure of the…
The paper discusses derivative-free optimization (DFO), which involves minimizing a function without access to gradients or directional derivatives, only function evaluations. Classical DFO methods, which mimic gradient-based methods, such…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a method for globally optimizing black-box functions. While BO has been successfully applied to many scenarios, developing effective BO algorithms that scale to functions with high-dimensional domains is still…
Optimization over the Stiefel manifold $\mathrm{St}(p,d)$, the set of $p \times d$ column-orthonormal matrices, is fundamental in statistics, machine learning, and scientific computing, yet remains challenging in the presence of non-convex,…
We introduce a new mechanism for stochastic convex optimization (SCO) with user-level differential privacy guarantees. The convergence rates of this mechanism are similar to those in the prior work of Levy et al. (2021); Narayanan et al.…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) approximates the trust region update using multiple epochs of clipped SGD. Each epoch may drift further from the natural gradient direction, creating path-dependent noise. To understand this drift, we can…
A new topology optimization method called the Proportional Topology Optimization (PTO) is presented. As a non-gradient method, PTO is simple to understand, easy to implement, and is also efficient and accurate at the same time. It is…
Many science and engineering applications feature non-convex optimization problems where the objective function can not be handled analytically, i.e. it is a black box. Examples include design optimization via experiments, or via costly…
In high-dimensional settings, Bayesian optimization (BO) can be expensive and infeasible. The random embedding Bayesian optimization algorithm is commonly used to address high-dimensional BO challenges. However, this method relies on the…
The paper studies decentralized optimization over networks, where agents minimize a composite objective consisting of the sum of smooth convex functions--the agents' losses--and an additional nonsmooth convex extended value function. We…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a model-based approach to sequentially optimize expensive black-box functions, such as the validation error of a deep neural network with respect to its hyperparameters. In many real-world scenarios, the…
Climate-controlled cabins have for decades been standard in vehicles. Model Predictive Controllers (MPCs) have shown promising results in achieving temperature tracking in vehicle cabins and may improve upon model-free control performance.…
We propose and analyze a model-based derivative-free (DFO) algorithm for solving bound-constrained optimization problems where the objective function is the composition of a smooth function and a vector of black-box functions. We assume…