Related papers: The Multi-Query Paradox in Zeroth-Order Optimizati…

This paper presents a state-of-the-art algorithm for the vertex enumeration problem of arrangements, which is based on the proposed new pivot rule, called the Zero rule. The Zero rule possesses several desirable properties: i) It gets rid…

We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…

Generative auto-bidding has demonstrated strong performance in online advertising, yet it often suffers from data scarcity in small-scale settings with limited advertiser participation. While cross-task data sharing is a natural remedy to…

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising solution for fine-tuning LLMs under strict memory constraints, as it avoids the prohibitive memory cost of storing activations for backpropagation. However, existing ZO methods…

The increasing computational and memory demands in deep learning present significant challenges, especially in resource-constrained environments. We introduce a zero-order quantized optimization (ZOQO) method designed for training models…

Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…

We consider the allocation of $m$ balls into $n$ bins with incomplete information. In the classical Two-Choice process a ball first queries the load of two randomly chosen bins and is then placed in the least loaded bin. In our setting,…

We study first-order methods for constrained min-max optimization. Existing methods either require two gradient calls or two projections in each iteration, which may be costly in some applications. In this paper, we first show that a…

Iterative optimization is central to modern artificial intelligence (AI) and provides a crucial framework for understanding adaptive systems. This review provides a unified perspective on this subject, bridging classic theory with neural…

Bayesian optimisation (BO) has been widely used to solve problems with expensive function evaluations. In multi-objective optimisation problems, BO aims to find a set of approximated Pareto optimal solutions. There are typically two ways to…

Zeroth-order (derivative-free) optimization attracts a lot of attention in machine learning, because explicit gradient calculations may be computationally expensive or infeasible. To handle large scale problems both in volume and dimension,…

Interest in stochastic zeroth-order (SZO) methods has recently been revived in black-box optimization scenarios such as adversarial black-box attacks to deep neural networks. SZO methods only require the ability to evaluate the objective…

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,…

Frequently, when dealing with many machine learning models, optimization problems appear to be challenging due to a limited understanding of the constructions and characterizations of the objective functions in these problems. Therefore,…

Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…

We investigate the effectiveness of adaptive zeroth-order (ZO) optimization for memory-constrained fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Contrary to prior claims, we show that adaptive ZO methods such as ZO-Adam offer no convergence…

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…

Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…

We study nonlinear constrained optimization problems in which only function evaluations of the objective and constraints are available. Existing zeroth-order methods rely on noisy gradient and Jacobian surrogates in high dimensions, making…

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…