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Related papers: New Aspects of Black Box Conditional Gradient: Var…

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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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-20 Anit Kumar Sahu , Manzil Zaheer , Soummya Kar

This paper addresses risk averse constrained optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions can only be computed by a blackbox subject to unknown uncertainties. To handle mixed aleatory/epistemic uncertainties, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-18 Charles Audet , Jean Bigeon , Romain Couderc , Michael Kokkolaras

This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Srujan Teja Thomdapu , Harshvardhan , Ketan Rajawat

Projection-free optimization via different variants of the Frank-Wolfe (FW), a.k.a. Conditional Gradient method has become one of the cornerstones in optimization for machine learning since in many cases the linear minimization oracle is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Pavel Dvurechensky , Petr Ostroukhov , Kamil Safin , Shimrit Shtern , Mathias Staudigl

Black-box algorithms are designed to optimize functions without relying on their underlying analytical structure or gradient information, making them essential when gradients are inaccessible or difficult to compute. Traditional methods for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yedidya Kfir , Elad Sarafian , Sarit Kraus , Yoram Louzoun

The conditional gradient algorithm (also known as the Frank-Wolfe algorithm) has recently regained popularity in the machine learning community due to its projection-free property to solve constrained problems. Although many variants of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Xiyuan Wei , Bin Gu , Heng Huang

We propose a novel generalization of the conditional gradient (CG / Frank-Wolfe) algorithm for minimizing a smooth function $f$ under an intersection of compact convex sets, using a first-order oracle for $\nabla f$ and linear minimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-11 Zev Woodstock , Sebastian Pokutta

This paper develops negative curvature methods for continuous nonlinear unconstrained optimization in stochastic settings, in which function, gradient, and Hessian information is available only through probabilistic oracles, i.e., oracles…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Albert S. Berahas , Raghu Bollapragada , Wanping Dong

We study the problem of generating adversarial examples in a black-box setting in which only loss-oracle access to a model is available. We introduce a framework that conceptually unifies much of the existing work on black-box attacks, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-29 Andrew Ilyas , Logan Engstrom , Aleksander Madry

We investigate the convergence properties of a class of iterative algorithms designed to minimize a potentially non-smooth and noisy objective function, which may be algebraically intractable and whose values may be obtained as the output…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-04 Christophe Andrieu , Nicolas Chopin , Ettore Fincato , Mathieu Gerber

In physics and engineering, many processes are modeled using non-differentiable black-box simulators, making the optimization of such functions particularly challenging. To address such cases, inspired by the Gradient Theorem, we propose…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) algorithms have been recently used to solve black-box or simulation-based learning and control problems, where the gradient of the objective function cannot be easily computed but can be approximated using the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-09 Yan Zhang , Yi Zhou , Kaiyi Ji , Michael M. Zavlanos

First-order methods for minimization and saddle point (min-max) problems are widely used for solving large-scale problems, in particular arising in machine learning. The majority of works obtain favorable complexity guarantees of such…

We present two first-order, sequential optimization algorithms to solve constrained optimization problems. We consider a black-box setting with a priori unknown, non-convex objective and constraint functions that have Lipschitz continuous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-19 Abraham P. Vinod , Arie Israel , Ufuk Topcu

The purpose of this survey is to serve both as a gentle introduction and a coherent overview of state-of-the-art Frank--Wolfe algorithms, also called conditional gradient algorithms, for function minimization. These algorithms are…

We investigate a class of nonconvex optimization problems characterized by a feasible set consisting of level-bounded nonconvex regularizers, with a continuously differentiable objective. We propose a novel hybrid approach to tackle such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-28 Xiangyu Yang , Hao Wang , Yichen Zhu , Xiao Wang

We consider a generic framework of optimization algorithms based on gradient descent. We develop a quantum algorithm that computes the gradient of a multi-variate real-valued function $f:\mathbb{R}^d\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ by evaluating it…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-02-19 András Gilyén , Srinivasan Arunachalam , Nathan Wiebe

Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Yin Liu , Sam Davanloo Tajbakhsh

We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-24 Nuri Mert Vural , Lu Yu , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Stanislav Volgushev , Murat A. Erdogdu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Thomas Guilmeau , Emilie Chouzenoux , Víctor Elvira