Related papers: Enhancing finite-difference based derivative-free …
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…
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…
We propose and analyze a model-based derivative-free (DFO) algorithm for solving bound-constrained optimization problems where the objective function is the composition of a smooth function and a vector of black-box functions. We assume…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is vital in solving complex optimization problems where only noisy function evaluations are available through an oracle. Within this domain, DFO via finite difference (FD) approximation has emerged as a…
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.…
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…
In this paper, we study optimization methods consisting of iteratively minimizing surrogates of an objective function. By proposing several algorithmic variants and simple convergence analyses, we make two main contributions. First, we…
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) 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…
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…
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…
Optimization and control of complex unsteady flows remains an important challenge due to the large cost of performing a function evaluation, i.e. a full computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Reducing the number of required function…
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…
In this work, we propose a heuristic based open source solver for finding global solution to constrained derivative-free optimization (DFO) problems. Our solver named Global optimization using Surrogates for Derivative-free Optimization…
Offline optimization is an emerging problem in many experimental engineering domains including protein, drug or aircraft design, where online experimentation to collect evaluation data is too expensive or dangerous. To avoid that, one has…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is a method that does not require the calculation of gradients or higher-order derivatives of the objective function, making it suitable for cases where the objective function is non-differentiable or the…
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 minimizing functions for which it is expensive to compute the (possibly stochastic) gradient. Such functions are prevalent in reinforcement learning, imitation learning and adversarial training. Our target optimization framework…
In this paper, we propose the StepDIRECT algorithm for derivative-free optimization (DFO), in which the black-box objective function has a stepwise landscape. Our framework is based on the well-known DIRECT algorithm. By incorporating the…
The field of derivative-free optimization (DFO) studies algorithms for nonlinear optimization that do not rely on the availability of gradient or Hessian information. It is primarily designed for settings when functions are black-box,…