Related papers: A Framework for Finding Local Saddle Points in Two…
This paper focuses on the online saddle point problem, which involves a sequence of two-player time-varying convex-concave games. Considering the nonstationarity of the environment, we adopt the duality gap and the dynamic Nash equilibrium…
Convex optimization problems arising in applications often have favorable objective functions and complicated constraints, thereby precluding first-order methods from being immediately applicable. We describe an approach that exchanges the…
The paper considers distributed gradient flow (DGF) for multi-agent nonconvex optimization. DGF is a continuous-time approximation of distributed gradient descent that is often easier to study than its discrete-time counterpart. The paper…
Some real-world problems revolve to solve the optimization problem \max_{x\in\mathcal{X}}f\left(x\right) where f\left(.\right) is a black-box function and X might be the set of non-vectorial objects (e.g., distributions) where we can only…
For a real valued function, a point is critical if its derivatives are zero, and a critical point is a saddle point if it is not a local extrema. In this paper, we study algorithms to find saddle points of general Morse index. Our approach…
Optimizing discrete black-box functions is key in several domains, e.g. protein engineering and drug design. Due to the lack of gradient information and the need for sample efficiency, Bayesian optimization is an ideal candidate for these…
We develop an inexact primal-dual first-order smoothing framework to solve a class of non-bilinear saddle point problems with primal strong convexity. Compared with existing methods, our framework yields a significant improvement over the…
Bayesian Optimisation (BO) methods seek to find global optima of objective functions which are only available as a black-box or are expensive to evaluate. Such methods construct a surrogate model for the objective function, quantifying the…
Centered around solving the Online Saddle Point problem, this paper introduces the Online Convex-Concave Optimization (OCCO) framework, which involves a sequence of two-player time-varying convex-concave games. We propose the generalized…
Saddle point problems, ubiquitous in optimization, extend beyond game theory to diverse domains like power networks and reinforcement learning. This paper presents novel approaches to tackle saddle point problem, with a focus on…
We proposed an iterate scheme for solving convex-concave saddle-point problems associated with general convex-concave functions. We demonstrated that when our iterate scheme is applied to a special class of convex-concave functions, which…
It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…
Finding approximate stationary points, i.e., points where the gradient is approximately zero, of non-convex but smooth objective functions $f$ over unrestricted $d$-dimensional domains is one of the most fundamental problems in classical…
We consider quantile optimization of black-box functions that are estimated with noise. We propose two new iterative three-timescale local search algorithms. The first algorithm uses an appropriately modified finite-difference-based…
We study the problem of minimizing a convex function on a nonempty, finite subset of the integer lattice when the function cannot be evaluated at noninteger points. We propose a new underestimator that does not require access to…
Gradient descent and its variants are widely used in machine learning. However, oracle access of gradient may not be available in many applications, limiting the direct use of gradient descent. This paper proposes a method of estimating…
Bayesian Optimization is the state of the art technique for the optimization of black boxes, i.e., functions where we do not have access to their analytical expression nor its gradients, they are expensive to evaluate and its evaluation is…
Given two bounded convex sets $X\subseteq\RR^m$ and $Y\subseteq\RR^n,$ specified by membership oracles, and a continuous convex-concave function $F:X\times Y\to\RR$, we consider the problem of computing an $\eps$-approximate saddle point,…
The increasing availability of graph-structured data motivates the task of optimising over functions defined on the node set of graphs. Traditional graph search algorithms can be applied in this case, but they may be sample-inefficient and…
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…