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Frequently, the burgeoning field of black-box optimization encounters challenges due to a limited understanding of the mechanisms of the objective function. To address such problems, in this work we focus on the deterministic concept of…
Functionally constrained stochastic optimization problems, where neither the objective function nor the constraint functions are analytically available, arise frequently in machine learning applications. In this work, assuming we only have…
Parallel black box optimization consists in estimating the optimum of a function using $\lambda$ parallel evaluations of $f$. Averaging the $\mu$ best individuals among the $\lambda$ evaluations is known to provide better estimates of the…
In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…
We propose a novel zeroth-order optimization algorithm based on an efficient sampling strategy. Under mild global regularity conditions on the objective function, we establish non-asymptotic convergence rates for the proposed method.…
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…
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…
Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…
Black-box optimization is often encountered for decision-making in complex systems management, where the knowledge of system is limited. Under these circumstances, it is essential to balance the utilization of new information with…
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…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
The challenges of black box optimization arise due to imprecise responses and limited output information. This article describes new results on optimizing multivariable functions using an Order Oracle, which provides access only to the…
In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…
We address black-box convex optimization problems, where the objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be sampled within the feasible set. The challenge is thus to generate a sequence of feasible points converging…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…
Statistical machine learning models trained with stochastic gradient algorithms are increasingly being deployed in critical scientific applications. However, computing the stochastic gradient in several such applications is highly expensive…
This paper addresses black-box smooth optimization problems, where the objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be queried. The main goal of this work is to generate a sequence of feasible points converging…
Black-box optimization is primarily important for many compute-intensive applications, including reinforcement learning (RL), robot control, etc. This paper presents a novel theoretical framework for black-box optimization, in which our…
We provide a novel computer-assisted technique for systematically analyzing first-order methods for optimization. In contrast with previous works, the approach is particularly suited for handling sublinear convergence rates and stochastic…
This paper studies a stochastic algorithm for linearly constrained nonconvex optimization, where the objective function is smooth but only unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded variance are available. We propose a momentum-based…