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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

In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-22 Pranay Sharma , Kaidi Xu , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xue Lin , Pramod K. Varshney

This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Charles Audet , Jean Bigeon , Romain Couderc , Michael Kokkolaras

In this paper, we study a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. While restart strategies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-05 Xinming Wu , Zi Xu , Huiling Zhang

Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-03 Liu Liu , Minhao Cheng , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Dacheng Tao

In this paper, we introduce an unbiased gradient simulation algorithms for solving convex optimization problem with stochastic function compositions. We show that the unbiased gradient generated from the algorithm has finite variance and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-22 Jose Blanchet , Donald Goldfarb , Garud Iyengar , Fengpei Li , Chaoxu Zhou

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-04 Kenji Kawaguchi , Haihao Lu

In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Prashant Khanduri , Ioannis Tsaknakis , Yihua Zhang , Sijia Liu , Mingyi Hong

We consider stochastic approximation for the least squares regression problem in the non-strongly convex setting. We present the first practical algorithm that achieves the optimal prediction error rates in terms of dependence on the noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion

An algorithm is proposed for solving optimization problems with stochastic objective and deterministic equality and inequality constraints. This algorithm is objective-function-free in the sense that it only uses the objective's gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 S. Gratton , Ph. L. Toint

We study quantum algorithms based on quantum (sub)gradient estimation using noisy function evaluation oracles, and demonstrate the first dimension-independent query complexities (up to poly-logarithmic factors) for zeroth-order convex…

A new algorithm for smooth constrained optimization is proposed that never computes the value of the problem's objective function and that handles both equality and inequality constraints. The algorithm uses an adaptive switching strategy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-13 S. Bellavia , S. Gratton , B. Morini , Ph. L. Toint

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

We propose a stochastic gradient framework for solving stochastic composite convex optimization problems with (possibly) infinite number of linear inclusion constraints that need to be satisfied almost surely. We use smoothing and homotopy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-04 Olivier Fercoq , Ahmet Alacaoglu , Ion Necoara , Volkan Cevher

We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Taha El Bakkali , El Mahdi Chayti , Qiuyi Zhang , Imane Rahali , Omar Saadi

We consider smooth stochastic convex optimization problems in the context of algorithms which are based on directional derivatives of the objective function. This context can be considered as an intermediate one between derivative-free…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-22 Pavel Dvurechensky , Eduard Gorbunov , Alexander Gasnikov

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-08 Hongcheng Liu , Yu Yang

In this paper, we investigate accelerated first-order methods for smooth convex optimization problems under inexact information on the gradient of the objective. The noise in the gradient is considered to be additive with two possibilities:…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-10 Vasin Artem , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Vladimir Spokoiny

We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-10-27 Guanghui Lan

This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-11-13 Aryan Mokhtari , Hamed Hassani , Amin Karbasi