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

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Large language models (LLMs) excel across various tasks, but standard first-order (FO) fine-tuning demands considerable memory, significantly limiting real-world deployment. Recently, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization stood out as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Qitao Tan , Jun Liu , Zheng Zhan , Caiwei Ding , Yanzhi Wang , Xiaolong Ma , Jaewoo Lee , Jin Lu , Geng Yuan

Recent works have developed new projection-free first-order methods based on utilizing linesearches and normal vector computations to maintain feasibility. These oracles can be cheaper than orthogonal projection or linear optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-01 Thabo Samakhoana , Benjamin Grimmer

Comparison-Based Optimization (CBO) is an optimization paradigm that assumes only very limited access to the objective function f(x). Despite the growing relevance of CBO to real-world applications, this field has received little attention…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Isha Slavin , Daniel McKenzie

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Zhendong Mi , Qitao Tan , Grace Li Zhang , Zhaozhuo Xu , Geng Yuan , Shaoyi Huang

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias

Continual learning requires new-task adaptation without damaging previously acquired capabilities. Recent forward-pass and zeroth-order (ZO) results show that low-query adaptation may retain better than first-order (FO) descent, but the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yao Shu , Jian Mu , Zhongxiang Dai

In classification, the de facto method for aggregating individual losses is the average loss. When the actual metric of interest is 0-1 loss, it is common to minimize the average surrogate loss for some well-behaved (e.g. convex) surrogate.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Bryan He , James Zou

We study the inventory placement problem of splitting $Q$ units of a single item across warehouses in advance of a downstream online matching problem that represents the dynamic fulfillment decisions of an e-commerce retailer. This is a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Boris Epstein , Will Ma

Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

Zeroth-order (ZO) methods are widely used when gradients are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, including black-box learning and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large models, yet their optimization dynamics in deep learning remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Minhak Song , Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Niao He , Michael Muehlebach , Sewoong Oh

We study a class of cooperative multi-agent optimization problems, where each agent is associated with a local action vector and a local cost, and the goal is to cooperatively find the joint action profile that minimizes the average of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-24 Yujie Tang , Zhaolin Ren , Na Li

We propose a novel framework for optimizing injection strategies in large-scale CO$_2$ storage combining multi-agent models with multi-objective optimization, and reservoir simulation. We investigate whether agents should form coalitions…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-06-13 Per Pettersson , Sebastian Krumscheid , Sarah Gasda

Nowadays, several crowdsourcing projects exploit social choice methods for computing an aggregate ranking of alternatives given individual rankings provided by workers. Motivated by such systems, we consider a setting where each worker is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Ioannis Caragiannis , Xenophon Chatzigeorgiou , George A. Krimpas , Alexandros A. Voudouris

Online bilevel optimization (OBO) is a powerful framework for machine learning problems where both outer and inner objectives evolve over time, requiring dynamic updates. Current OBO approaches rely on deterministic \textit{window-smoothed}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Parvin Nazari , Bojian Hou , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Li Shen , George Michailidis

Stochastic zeroth-order (SZO), or gradient-free, optimization allows to optimize arbitrary functions by relying only on function evaluations under parameter perturbations, however, the iteration complexity of SZO methods suffers a factor…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Artem Sokolov , Julian Hitschler , Mayumi Ohta , Stefan Riezler

This paper considers a consensus optimization problem, where all the nodes in a network, with access to the zeroth-order information of its local objective function only, attempt to cooperatively achieve a common minimizer of the sum of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-17 Chengan Wang , Zichong Ou , Jie Lu

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) is a well-studied problem for several important recommendation problems. While multiple approaches have been proposed, in this work, we focus on using constrained optimization formulations (e.g., quadratic…

Applications · Statistics 2016-02-16 Kinjal Basu , Ankan Saha , Shaunak Chatterjee

Deep learning models, despite their impressive achievements, suffer from high computational costs and memory requirements, limiting their usability in resource-constrained environments. Sparse neural networks significantly alleviate these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jie Ji , Gen Li , Kaiyuan Deng , Fatemeh Afghah , Xiaolong Ma

Processing sets or other unordered, potentially variable-sized inputs in neural networks is usually handled by aggregating a number of input tensors into a single representation. While a number of aggregation methods already exist from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Sergey Bartunov , Fabian B. Fuchs , Timothy Lillicrap

Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization is pivotal for scenarios where backpropagation is unavailable, such as memory-constrained on-device learning and black-box optimization. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: they are either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Chen Liang , Xiatao Sun , Qian Wang , Daniel Rakita