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Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Xinran Zheng , Tara Javidi , Behrouz Touri

This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-10 Huaiyi Mu , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Zhongkui Li

Price determination is a central research topic of revenue management in marketing. The important aspect in pricing is controlling the stochastic behavior of demand, and the previous studies have tackled price optimization problems with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-04 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Elissa Mhanna , Mohamad Assaad

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-06 Zhongruo Wang , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma , Meisam Razaviyayn

We consider a zeroth-order distributed optimization problem, where the global objective function is a black-box function and, as such, its gradient information is inaccessible to the local agents. Instead, the local agents can only use the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-29 Yi Shen , Yan Zhang , Scott Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Michael M. Zavlanos

We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-08 Chengchang Liu , Zongqi Wan , Haishan Ye , John C. S. Lui

Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Ruiyang Jin , Yuke Zhou , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Siyang Gao

The minimization of convex functions which are only available through partial and noisy information is a key methodological problem in many disciplines. In this paper we consider convex optimization with noisy zero-th order information,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Francis Bach , Vianney Perchet

In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias

As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Sijia Liu , Bhavya Kailkhura , Pin-Yu Chen , Paishun Ting , Shiyu Chang , Lisa Amini

In this paper, we consider non-smooth stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round under infinite noise variance. In the classical setting when noise has finite variance, an optimal algorithm, built upon the…

Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-22 Chinmay Maheshwari , Chih-Yuan Chiu , Eric Mazumdar , S. Shankar Sastry , Lillian J. Ratliff

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-16 Weijia Shao , Sahin Albayrak

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Michael Muehlebach , Niao He

In this work, we consider a distributed multi-agent stochastic optimization problem, where each agent holds a local objective function that is smooth and convex, and that is subject to a stochastic process. The goal is for all agents to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-12 Elissa Mhanna , Mohamad Assaad

In this paper, we consider a distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problem, which is about minimizing a sum of $n$ local cost functions over a network with only zeroth-order information. A novel single-loop Decentralized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Hongxu Chen , Jinchi Chen , Ke Wei
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