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In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-03 Akash Mondal , Prashanth L. A. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Naoki Sato , Hideaki Iiduka

When the nonconvex problem is complicated by stochasticity, the sample complexity of stochastic first-order methods may depend linearly on the problem dimension, which is undesirable for large-scale problems. To alleviate this linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Yue Xie , Jiawen Bi , Hongcheng Liu

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

We consider non-smooth saddle point optimization problems. To solve these problems, we propose a zeroth-order method under bounded or Lipschitz continuous noise, possible adversarial. In contrast to the state-of-the-art algorithms, our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-28 Darina Dvinskikh , Vladislav Tominin , Yaroslav Tominin , Alexander Gasnikov

We design and analyze a novel accelerated gradient-based algorithm for a class of bilevel optimization problems. These problems have various applications arising from machine learning and image processing, where optimal solutions of the two…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-20 Sepideh Samadi , Daniel Burbano , Farzad Yousefian

Composite convex optimization problems which include both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term have important applications in machine learning and signal processing, such as when one wishes to recover an unknown matrix that is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-28 Dan Garber , Atara Kaplan

Bilevel optimization problems consist of minimizing a value function whose evaluation depends on the solution of an inner optimization problem. These problems are typically tackled using first-order methods that require computing the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-30 Marco Rando , Samuel Vaiter

Stochastic bilevel optimization generalizes the classic stochastic optimization from the minimization of a single objective to the minimization of an objective function that depends the solution of another optimization problem. Recently,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-01 Tianyi Chen , Yuejiao Sun , Quan Xiao , Wotao Yin

In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-12 Andre Milzarek , Xiantao Xiao , Shicong Cen , Zaiwen Wen , Michael Ulbrich

Bilevel optimization, the problem of minimizing a value function which involves the arg-minimum of another function, appears in many areas of machine learning. In a large scale empirical risk minimization setting where the number of samples…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-03 Mathieu Dagréou , Pierre Ablin , Samuel Vaiter , Thomas Moreau

In this paper we propose a sequential minimax optimization (SMO) method for solving a class of constrained bilevel optimization problems in which the lower-level part is a possibly nonsmooth convex optimization problem, while the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Zhaosong Lu , Sanyou Mei

We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-28 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy

A stochastic iterative algorithm approximating second-order information using von Neumann series is discussed. We present convergence guarantees for strongly-convex and smooth functions. Our analysis is much simpler in contrast to a similar…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-04-14 Mojmir Mutny

Bilevel optimization has been recently used in many machine learning problems such as hyperparameter optimization, policy optimization, and meta learning. Although many bilevel optimization methods have been proposed, they still suffer from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-27 Feihu Huang , Junyi Li , Shangqian Gao , Heng Huang

In this paper, we show how to transform any optimization problem that arises from fitting a machine learning model into one that (1) detects and removes contaminated data from the training set while (2) simultaneously fitting the trimmed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-07 Aleksandr Aravkin , Damek Davis

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Albert S. Berahas , Frank E. Curtis , Lara Zebiane

Bilevel optimization reveals the inner structure of otherwise oblique optimization problems, such as hyperparameter tuning, neural architecture search, and meta-learning. A common goal in bilevel optimization is to minimize a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-29 Lesi Chen , Jing Xu , Jingzhao Zhang

In this paper, we consider non-smooth stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round under infinite noise variance. In the classical setting when noise has finite variance, an optimal algorithm, built upon the…

We consider the minimisation problem of submodular functions and investigate the application of a zeroth-order method to this problem. The method is based on exploiting a Gaussian smoothing random oracle to estimate the smoothed function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Amir Ali Farzin , Yuen-Man Pun , Philipp Braun , Tyler Summers , Iman Shames