Related papers: Direct search for stochastic optimization in rando…

Stochastic compositional optimization arises in many important machine learning tasks such as value function evaluation in reinforcement learning and portfolio management. The objective function is the composition of two expectations of…

The local gradient points to the direction of the steepest slope in an infinitesimal neighborhood. An optimizer guided by the local gradient is often trapped in local optima when the loss landscape is multi-modal. A directional Gaussian…

Derivative-free algorithms seek the minimum of a given function based only on function values queried at appropriate points. Although these methods are widely used in practice, their performance is known to worsen as the problem dimension…

We propose LSDAT, an image-agnostic decision-based black-box attack that exploits low-rank and sparse decomposition (LSD) to dramatically reduce the number of queries and achieve superior fooling rates compared to the state-of-the-art…

Constrained second-order convex optimization algorithms are the method of choice when a high accuracy solution to a problem is needed, due to their local quadratic convergence. These algorithms require the solution of a constrained…

Failure-Directed Search (FDS) is a significant complete generic search algorithm used in Constraint Programming (CP) to efficiently explore the search space, proven particularly effective on scheduling problems. This paper analyzes FDS's…

Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…

In recent years, nonconvex minimax problems have attracted significant attention due to their broad applications in machine learning, including generative adversarial networks, robust optimization and adversarial training. Most existing…

Applications such as adversarially robust training and Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization (WDRO) can be naturally formulated as min-sum-max optimization problems. While this formulation can be rewritten as an equivalent…

We present a novel method called TESALOCS (TEnsor SAmpling and LOCal Search) for multidimensional optimization, combining the strengths of gradient-free discrete methods and gradient-based approaches. The discrete optimization in our method…

In this paper, we deal with the problem of optimizing a black-box smooth function over a full-dimensional smooth convex set. We study sets of feasible curves that allow to properly characterize stationarity of a solution and possibly carry…

This paper presents a stochastic approximation proximal subgradient (SAPS) method for stochastic convex-concave minimax optimization. By accessing unbiased and variance bounded approximate subgradients, we show that this algorithm exhibits…

Recently, several approaches successfully demonstrated that weight-sharing Neural Architecture Search (NAS) can effectively explore a search space of elastic low-rank adapters (LoRA), allowing the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and…

Approximate second-order optimization methods often exhibit poorer generalization compared to first-order approaches. In this work, we look into this issue through the lens of the loss landscape and find that existing second-order methods…

Since their introduction, anchoring methods in extragradient-type saddlepoint problems have inspired a flurry of research due to their ability to provide order-optimal rates of accelerated convergence in very general problem settings. Such…

Finetuning foundation models for specific tasks is an emerging paradigm in modern machine learning. The efficacy of task-specific finetuning largely depends on the selection of appropriate training data. We present TSDS (Task-Specific Data…

Optimal transport (OT) defines a powerful framework to compare probability distributions in a geometrically faithful way. However, the practical impact of OT is still limited because of its computational burden. We propose a new class of…

We investigate the continuous non-monotone DR-submodular maximization problem subject to a down-closed convex solvable constraint. Our first contribution is to construct an example to demonstrate that (first-order) stationary points can…

This paper is devoted to a new modification of a recently proposed adaptive stochastic mirror descent algorithm for constrained convex optimization problems in the case of several convex functional constraints. Algorithms, standard and its…

In this paper, a new theory is developed for first-order stochastic convex optimization, showing that the global convergence rate is sufficiently quantified by a local growth rate of the objective function in a neighborhood of the optimal…