Related papers: Single Point-Based Distributed Zeroth-Order Optimi…
In this letter, we first propose a \underline{Z}eroth-\underline{O}rder c\underline{O}ordinate \underline{M}ethod~(ZOOM) to solve the stochastic optimization problem over a decentralized network with only zeroth-order~(ZO) oracle feedback…
We examine fundamental tradeoffs in iterative distributed zeroth and first order stochastic optimization in multi-agent networks in terms of \emph{communication cost} (number of per-node transmissions) and \emph{computational cost},…
In this paper, we propose and analyze algorithms for zeroth-order optimization of non-convex composite objectives, focusing on reducing the complexity dependence on dimensionality. This is achieved by exploiting the low dimensional…
In this paper, we focus on solving the decentralized optimization problem of minimizing the sum of $n$ objective functions over a multi-agent network. The agents are embedded in an undirected graph where they can only send/receive…
This paper considers a consensus optimization problem, where all the nodes in a network, with access to the zeroth-order information of its local objective function only, attempt to cooperatively achieve a common minimizer of the sum of…
This work is devoted to solving the composite optimization problem with the mixture oracle: for the smooth part of the problem, we have access to the gradient, and for the non-smooth part, only the one-point zero-order oracle is available.…
Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…
In this report, we study decentralized stochastic optimization to minimize a sum of smooth and strongly convex cost functions when the functions are distributed over a directed network of nodes. In contrast to the existing work, we use…
Decentralized optimization with orthogonality constraints is found widely in scientific computing and data science. Since the orthogonality constraints are nonconvex, it is quite challenging to design efficient algorithms. Existing…
We propose and analyze a randomized zeroth-order approach based on approximating the exact gradient byfinite differences computed in a set of orthogonal random directions that changes with each iteration. A number ofpreviously proposed…
We study distributed non-convex optimization on a time-varying multi-agent network. Each node has access to its own smooth local cost function, and the collective goal is to minimize the sum of these functions. We generalize the results…
This paper presents a special type of distributed optimization problems, where the summation of agents' local cost functions (i.e., global cost function) is convex, but each individual can be non-convex. Unlike most distributed optimization…
We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only available at a…
Rank-based zeroth-order (ZO) optimization -- which relies only on the ordering of function evaluations -- offers strong robustness to noise and monotone transformations, and underlies many successful algorithms such as CMA-ES, natural…
Many important machine learning applications amount to solving minimax optimization problems, and in many cases there is no access to the gradient information, but only the function values. In this paper, we focus on such a gradient-free…
This paper concerns a convex, stochastic zeroth-order optimization (S-ZOO) problem. The objective is to minimize the expectation of a cost function whose gradient is not directly accessible. For this problem, traditional optimization…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…
We revisit the one-point feedback zeroth-order (ZO) optimization problem, a classical setting in derivative-free optimization where only a single noisy function evaluation is available per query. Compared to their two-point counterparts,…
We study the distributed stochastic compositional optimization problems over directed communication networks in which agents privately own a stochastic compositional objective function and collaborate to minimize the sum of all objective…
Two types of zeroth-order stochastic algorithms have recently been designed for nonconvex optimization respectively based on the first-order techniques SVRG and SARAH/SPIDER. This paper addresses several important issues that are still open…