English
Related papers

Related papers: Zeroth-Order Non-smooth Non-convex Optimization vi…

200 papers

Randomized smoothing is a widely adopted technique for optimizing nonsmooth objective functions. However, its efficiency analysis typically relies on global Lipschitz continuity, a condition rarely met in practical applications. To address…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-10 Jingfan Xia , Zhenwei Lin , Qi Deng

We consider stochastic zeroth-order optimization over Riemannian submanifolds embedded in Euclidean space, where the task is to solve Riemannian optimization problem with only noisy objective function evaluations. Towards this, our main…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-06 Jiaxiang Li , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma

This paper presents a subgradient-based algorithm for constrained nonsmooth convex optimization that does not require projections onto the feasible set. While the well-established Frank-Wolfe algorithm and its variants already avoid…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Kamiar Asgari , Michael J. Neely

This paper focuses on the problem of minimizing a locally Lipschitz continuous function. Motivated by the effectiveness of Bregman gradient methods in training nonsmooth deep neural networks and the recent progress in stochastic subgradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Kuangyu Ding , Kim-Chuan Toh

In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-12 Andre Milzarek , Xiantao Xiao , Shicong Cen , Zaiwen Wen , Michael Ulbrich

We present two easy-to-implement gradient-free/zeroth-order methods to optimize a stochastic non-smooth function accessible only via a black-box. The methods are built upon efficient first-order methods in the heavy-tailed case, i.e., when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-25 Nikita Kornilov , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Darina Dvinskikh

This paper presents an extension of stochastic gradient descent for the minimization of Lipschitz continuous loss functions. Our motivation is for use in non-smooth non-convex stochastic optimization problems, which are frequently…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-05 Michael R. Metel , Akiko Takeda

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

In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-22 Minghan Yang , Andre Milzarek , Zaiwen Wen , Tong Zhang

Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-19 Feihu Huang , Bin Gu , Zhouyuan Huo , Songcan Chen , Heng Huang

This paper discusses several (sub)gradient methods attaining the optimal complexity for smooth problems with Lipschitz continuous gradients, nonsmooth problems with bounded variation of subgradients, weakly smooth problems with H\"older…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-02 Masoud Ahookhosh

We study the oracle complexity of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization, with the algorithm assumed to have access only to local function information. It has been shown by Davis, Drusvyatskiy, and Jiang (2023) that for nonsmooth Lipschitz…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-17 Guy Kornowski , Swati Padmanabhan , Ohad Shamir

In this work, we develop new optimization algorithms that use approximate second-order information combined with the gradient regularization technique to achieve fast global convergence rates for both convex and non-convex objectives. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Andrei Semenov , Martin Jaggi , Nikita Doikov

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

This work analyzes the convergence of a class of smoothing-based gradient descent methods when applied to optimization problems. In particular, Gaussian smoothing is employed to define a nonlocal gradient that reduces high-frequency noise,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-27 Andrew Starnes , Anton Dereventsov , Clayton Webster

In this paper, we consider a class of structured nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems, in which the objective function is formed by the sum of a possibly nonsmooth nonconvex function and a differentiable function whose gradient is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-01 Tan Nhat Pham , Minh N. Dao , Rakibuzzaman Shah , Nargiz Sultanova , Guoyin Li , Syed Islam

This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-17 Vladimir Norkin , Alois Pichler , Anton Kozyriev

The subgradient method is one of the most fundamental algorithmic schemes for nonsmooth optimization. The existing complexity and convergence results for this method are mainly derived for Lipschitz continuous objective functions. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-01 Xiao Li , Lei Zhao , Daoli Zhu , Anthony Man-Cho So

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

In this paper, we consider the minimization of a nonsmooth nonconvex objective function $f(x)$ over a closed convex subset $\mathcal{X}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, with additional nonsmooth nonconvex constraints $c(x) = 0$. We develop a unified…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-16 Nachuan Xiao , Kuangyu Ding , Xiaoyin Hu , Kim-Chuan Toh