Related papers: Gradient-free stochastic optimization for additive…
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…
In this paper we consider stochastic weakly convex composite problems, however without the existence of a stochastic subgradient oracle. We present a derivative free algorithm that uses a two point approximation for computing a gradient…
We consider stochastic optimization problems involving an expected value of a nonlinear function of a base random vector and a conditional expectation of another function depending on the base random vector, a dependent random vector, and…
A parametric class of trust-region algorithms for constrained nonconvex optimization is analyzed, where the objective function is never computed. By defining appropriate first-order stationarity criteria, we are able to extend the Adagrad…
In this paper, we study the black box optimization problem under the Polyak--Lojasiewicz (PL) condition, assuming that the objective function is not just smooth, but has higher smoothness. By using "kernel-based" approximation instead of…
We develop and analyse an approach to optimize functions $l\colon \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ not assumed to be convex, differentiable or even continuous. The algorithm belongs to the class of model-based search methods. The idea…
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…
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…
We study the trade-offs between convergence rate and robustness to gradient errors in designing a first-order algorithm. We focus on gradient descent (GD) and accelerated gradient (AG) methods for minimizing strongly convex functions when…
We consider decentralized gradient-free optimization of minimizing Lipschitz continuous functions that satisfy neither smoothness nor convexity assumption. We propose two novel gradient-free algorithms, the Decentralized Gradient-Free…
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…
We develop an algorithm that combines model-based and model-free methods for solving a nonlinear optimal control problem with a quadratic cost in which the system model is given by a linear state-space model with a small additive nonlinear…
We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We study the complexity of finding the global solution to stochastic nonconvex optimization when the objective function satisfies global Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) inequality and the queries from stochastic gradient oracles satisfy mild…
This work studies online zero-order optimization of convex and Lipschitz functions. We present a novel gradient estimator based on two function evaluations and randomization on the $\ell_1$-sphere. Considering different geometries of…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…