Related papers: Fully Zeroth-Order Bilevel Programming via Gaussia…
This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…
Randomized smoothing is a widely adopted technique for optimizing nonsmooth objective functions. However, its efficiency analysis typically relies on global Lipschitz continuity, a condition rarely met in practical applications. To address…
Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…
This paper considers the problem for finding the $(\delta,\epsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point of Lipschitz continuous objective, which is a rich function class to cover a great number of important applications. We construct a zeroth-order…
In this paper, we design and analyze a new family of adaptive subgradient methods for solving an important class of weakly convex (possibly nonsmooth) stochastic optimization problems. Adaptive methods that use exponential moving averages…
In this paper, we consider a stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem with the cost function being distributed over $n$ agents having access only to zeroth-order (ZO) information of the cost. This problem has various machine…
We propose techniques for approximating bilevel optimization problems with non-smooth lower level problems that can have a non-unique solution. To this end, we substitute the expression of a minimizer of the lower level minimization problem…
Functionally constrained stochastic optimization problems, where neither the objective function nor the constraint functions are analytically available, arise frequently in machine learning applications. In this work, assuming we only have…
We deal with the problem of gradient estimation for stochastic differentiable relaxations of algorithms, operators, simulators, and other non-differentiable functions. Stochastic smoothing conventionally perturbs the input of a…
Higher order schemes for stochastic partial differential equations that do not possess commutative noise require the simulation of iterated stochastic integrals. In this work, we propose a derivative-free Milstein type scheme to approximate…
We present a finite-time analysis of two smoothed functional stochastic approximation algorithms for simulation-based optimization. The first is a two time-scale gradient-based method, while the second is a three time-scale Newton-based…
We study unconstrained optimization problems of nonsmooth, nonconvex Lipschitz functions, using only noisy pairwise comparisons governed by a known link function. Our goal is to compute a $(\delta,\varepsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point.…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
We introduce a new zeroth-order algorithm for private stochastic optimization on nonconvex and nonsmooth objectives. Given a dataset of size $M$, our algorithm ensures $(\alpha,\alpha\rho^2/2)$-R\'enyi differential privacy and finds a…
We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…
In optimization-based image restoration models, the correct selection of hyperparameters is crucial for achieving superior performance. However, current research typically involves manual tuning of these hyperparameters, which is highly…
Bilevel learning has gained prominence in machine learning, inverse problems, and imaging applications, including hyperparameter optimization, learning data-adaptive regularizers, and optimizing forward operators. The large-scale nature of…
We present a novel gradient-free algorithm to solve a convex stochastic optimization problem, such as those encountered in medicine, physics, and machine learning (e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit problem), where the objective function…
Bilevel optimization problems are receiving increasing attention in machine learning as they provide a natural framework for hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. A key step to tackle these problems is the efficient computation of…