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Related papers: Zeroth-Order Constrained Optimization from a Contr…

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Single-point zeroth-order optimization (SZO) is useful in solving online black-box optimization and control problems in time-varying environments, as it queries the function value only once at each time step. However, the vanilla SZO method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-20 Xin Chen , Yujie Tang , Na Li

In this letter, we first propose a \underline{Z}eroth-\underline{O}rder c\underline{O}ordinate \underline{M}ethod~(ZOOM) to solve the stochastic optimization problem over a decentralized network with only zeroth-order~(ZO) oracle feedback…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Shengjun Zhang , Tan Shen , Hongwei Sun , Yunlong Dong , Dong Xie , Heng Zhang

$\ell_0$ constrained optimization is prevalent in machine learning, particularly for high-dimensional problems, because it is a fundamental approach to achieve sparse learning. Hard-thresholding gradient descent is a dominant technique to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 William de Vazelhes , Hualin Zhang , Huimin Wu , Xiao-Tong Yuan , Bin Gu

In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-22 Pranay Sharma , Kaidi Xu , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xue Lin , Pramod K. Varshney

We investigate accelerated zeroth-order algorithms for smooth composite convex optimization problems. While for unconstrained optimization, existing methods that merge 2-point zeroth-order gradient estimators with first-order frameworks…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-15 Silan Zhang , Yujie Tang

In many optimization problems arising from scientific, engineering and artificial intelligence applications, objective and constraint functions are available only as the output of a black-box or simulation oracle that does not provide…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-15 Jeffrey Larson , Matt Menickelly , Stefan M. Wild

Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Elissa Mhanna , Mohamad Assaad

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open…

Zeroth-order optimizers have recently emerged as a practical approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing GPU memory consumption compared to traditional first-order methods. Yet, existing zeroth-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Kairun Zhang , Haoyu Li , Yanjun Zhao , Yifan Sun , Huan Zhang

As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Sijia Liu , Bhavya Kailkhura , Pin-Yu Chen , Paishun Ting , Shiyu Chang , Lisa Amini

Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Noga Bar , Raja Giryes

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order methods like back-propagation is computationally intensive. Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimisation uses function evaluations instead of gradients, reducing memory usage, but suffers from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Alessio Galatolo , Zhenbang Dai , Katie Winkle , Meriem Beloucif

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Haishan Ye , Luo Luo

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success across various NLP tasks, but the substantial memory overhead during backpropagation remains a critical bottleneck, especially as model scales grow. Zeroth-order (ZO)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Feihu Jin , Shipeng Cen , Ying Tan

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,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-16 Ryota Nozawa , Pierre-Louis Poirion , Akiko Takeda

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Wei Lin , Yining Jiang , Qingyu Song , Qiao Xiang , Hong Xu

This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order feedback optimization in multi-agent systems with coupled constraints, where each agent operates its local action vector and observes only zeroth-order information to minimize a global cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-17 Yingpeng Duan , Yujie Tang

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

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) algorithms have been recently used to solve black-box or simulation-based learning and control problems, where the gradient of the objective function cannot be easily computed but can be approximated using the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-09 Yan Zhang , Yi Zhou , Kaiyi Ji , Michael M. Zavlanos