Related papers: Derivative-Free Optimization via Finite Difference…
Gradient-based methods are well-suited for derivative-free optimization (DFO), where finite-difference (FD) estimates are commonly used as gradient surrogates. Traditional stochastic approximation methods, such as Kiefer-Wolfowitz (KW) and…
Derivative-Free Optimization (DFO) involves methods that rely solely on evaluations of the objective function. One of the earliest strategies for designing DFO methods is to adapt first-order methods by replacing gradients with…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) consists in finding the best value of an objective function without relying on derivatives. To tackle such problems, one may build approximate derivatives, using for instance finite-difference estimates.…
The goal of this paper is to investigate an approach for derivative-free optimization that has not received sufficient attention in the literature and is yet one of the simplest to implement and parallelize. It consists of computing…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is the mathematical study of the optimization algorithms that do not use derivatives. One branch of DFO focuses on model-based DFO methods, where an approximation of the objective function is used to guide…
This paper studies the performative prediction problem where a learner aims to minimize the expected loss with a decision-dependent data distribution. Such setting is motivated when outcomes can be affected by the prediction model, e.g., in…
This paper provides lower bounds on the convergence rate of Derivative Free Optimization (DFO) with noisy function evaluations, exposing a fundamental and unavoidable gap between the performance of algorithms with access to gradients and…
Finite difference (FD) approximation is a classic approach to stochastic gradient estimation when only noisy function realizations are available. In this paper, we first provide a sample-driven method via the bootstrap technique to estimate…
The paper discusses derivative-free optimization (DFO), which involves minimizing a function without access to gradients or directional derivatives, only function evaluations. Classical DFO methods, which mimic gradient-based methods, such…
Derivative-free Riemannian optimization (DFRO) aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, under the constraint that the decision variables lie on a Riemannian manifold. The rapid increase in problem dimensions…
Derivative-free - or zeroth-order - optimization (DFO) has gained recent attention for its ability to solve problems in a variety of application areas, including machine learning, particularly involving objectives which are stochastic…
Derivative-Free optimization (DFO) focuses on designing methods to solve optimization problems without the analytical knowledge of gradients of the objective function. There are two main families of DFO methods: model-based methods and…
Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have garnered significant attention for their versatility and potential for solving a wide spectrum of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the cost of running these PLMs may be…
We consider model-based derivative-free optimization (DFO) for large-scale problems, based on iterative minimization in random subspaces. We provide the first worst-case complexity bound for such methods for convergence to approximate…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in system optimization problems when only noisy measurements of the system are available. This paper studies two types of SA algorithms in a multivariate Kiefer-Wolfowitz setting:…
We consider decentralized gradient-free optimization of minimizing Lipschitz continuous functions that satisfy neither smoothness nor convexity assumption. We propose two novel gradient-free algorithms, the Decentralized Gradient-Free…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) has recently gained a lot of momentum in machine learning, spawning interest in the community to design faster methods for problems where gradients are not accessible. While some attention has been given…
This paper addresses the study of derivative-free smooth optimization problems, where the gradient information on the objective function is unavailable. Two novel general derivative-free methods are proposed and developed for minimizing…
Stochastic optimization (SO) considers the problem of optimizing an objective function in the presence of noise. Most of the solution techniques in SO estimate gradients from the noise corrupted observations of the objective and adjust…
We consider solving nonlinear optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints, assuming that only zero-order information is available for both the objective and constraints, and that the objective is…