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In this paper, we consider an unconstrained stochastic optimization problem where the objective function exhibits high-order smoothness. Specifically, we propose a new stochastic first-order method (SFOM) with multi-extrapolated momentum,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-09 Chuan He

This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-27 Michael R. Metel , Akiko Takeda

This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Anik Kumar Paul , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Stochastic zeroth-order (SZO), or gradient-free, optimization allows to optimize arbitrary functions by relying only on function evaluations under parameter perturbations, however, the iteration complexity of SZO methods suffers a factor…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Artem Sokolov , Julian Hitschler , Mayumi Ohta , Stefan Riezler

In this paper, we formalise order-robust optimisation as an instance of online learning minimising simple regret, and propose Vroom, a zero'th order optimisation algorithm capable of achieving vanishing regret in non-stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Victor Gabillon , Rasul Tutunov , Michal Valko , Haitham Bou Ammar

We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Michal Valko

We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…

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

We consider the problem of minimizing a smooth, Lipschitz, convex function over a compact, convex set using sub-zeroth-order oracles: an oracle that outputs the sign of the directional derivative for a given point and a given direction, an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-02 Mustafa O. Karabag , Cyrus Neary , Ufuk Topcu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-08 Baiwei Guo , Yuning Jiang , Maryam Kamgarpour , Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate

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

Recently, convex nested stochastic composite optimization (NSCO) has received considerable attention for its applications in reinforcement learning and risk-averse optimization. The current NSCO algorithms have worse stochastic oracle…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Zhe Zhang , Guanghui Lan

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

We consider unconstrained randomized optimization of convex objective functions. We analyze the Random Pursuit algorithm, which iteratively computes an approximate solution to the optimization problem by repeated optimization over a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-05-25 Sebastian U. Stich , Christian L. Müller , Bernd Gärtner

This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Srujan Teja Thomdapu , Harshvardhan , Ketan Rajawat

We investigate the finite-time analysis of finding ($\delta,\epsilon$)-stationary points for nonsmooth nonconvex objectives in decentralized stochastic optimization. A set of agents aim at minimizing a global function using only their local…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Emre Sahinoglu , Shahin Shahrampour

Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-20 Laurent Condat , Elnur Gasanov , Peter Richtárik

Necessary conditions for high-order optimality in smooth nonlinear constrained optimization are explored and their inherent intricacy discussed. A two-phase minimization algorithm is proposed which can achieve approximate first-, second-…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-31 C. Cartis , N. I. M. Gould , Ph. L. Toint

This paper considers stochastic first-order algorithms for convex-concave minimax problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y}f(\bf x, \bf y)$, where $f$ can be presented by the average of $n$ individual components which are $L$-average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-01 Luo Luo , Guangzeng Xie , Tong Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

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

This work proposes a universal and adaptive second-order method for minimizing second-order smooth, convex functions. Our algorithm achieves $O(\sigma / \sqrt{T})$ convergence when the oracle feedback is stochastic with variance $\sigma^2$,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-13 Kimon Antonakopoulos , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher