Related papers: Gradient-Free Method for Heavily Constrained Nonco…

Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…

Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization plays an essential role in scenarios where gradient information is inaccessible or unaffordable, such as black-box systems and resource-constrained environments. While existing adaptive methods such…

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…

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…

This paper focuses on the problem of \emph{constrained} \emph{stochastic} optimization. A zeroth order Frank-Wolfe algorithm is proposed, which in addition to the projection-free nature of the vanilla Frank-Wolfe algorithm makes it gradient…

In this paper we consider stochastic weakly convex composite problems, however without the existence of a stochastic subgradient oracle. We present a derivative free algorithm that uses a two point approximation for computing a gradient…

This paper considers stochastic convex optimization problems with two sets of constraints: (a) deterministic constraints on the domain of the optimization variable, which are difficult to project onto; and (b) deterministic or stochastic…

Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is indispensable for complex non-convex tasks where explicit gradients are computationally prohibitive or strictly inaccessible. For deploying ZO methods over distributed heterogeneous networks, the gradient…

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…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is widely used for solving black-box optimization and control problems. In particular, single-point ZO (SZO) is well-suited to online or dynamic problem settings due to its requirement of only a single…

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…

Interest in stochastic zeroth-order (SZO) methods has recently been revived in black-box optimization scenarios such as adversarial black-box attacks to deep neural networks. SZO methods only require the ability to evaluate the objective…

Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied…

This paper is devoted to solving a convex stochastic optimization problem in a overparameterization setup for the case where the original gradient computation is not available, but an objective function value can be computed. For this class…

Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…

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…

Modern machine learning algorithms usually involve tuning multiple (from one to thousands) hyperparameters which play a pivotal role in terms of model generalizability. Black-box optimization and gradient-based algorithms are two dominant…

We propose an enhanced zeroth-order stochastic Frank-Wolfe framework to address constrained finite-sum optimization problems, a structure prevalent in large-scale machine-learning applications. Our method introduces a novel double variance…

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…