English
Related papers

Related papers: Revisiting Zeroth-Order Optimization: Minimum-Vari…

200 papers

We develop new perturbation techniques for conducting convergence analysis of various first-order algorithms for a class of nonsmooth optimization problems. We consider the iteration scheme of an algorithm to construct a perturbed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-25 Xiangfeng Wang , Jane Ye , Xiaoming Yuan , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang

In this paper, we consider non-smooth stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round under infinite noise variance. In the classical setting when noise has finite variance, an optimal algorithm, built upon the…

Adaptive optimization methods are well known to achieve superior convergence relative to vanilla gradient methods. The traditional viewpoint in optimization, particularly in convex optimization, explains this improved performance by arguing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Kaiqi Jiang , Dhruv Malik , Yuanzhi Li

Distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problems have recently received attention due to the growing interest of signal processing, computer vision, and natural language processing communities in applications deployed over…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-14 Yiyue Chen , Abolfazl Hashemi , Haris Vikalo

Domain shifts are ubiquitous in machine learning, and can substantially degrade a model's performance when deployed to real-world data. To address this, distribution alignment methods aim to learn feature representations which are invariant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Andrea Napoli , Paul White

We develop a novel randomised block coordinate primal-dual algorithm for a class of non-smooth ill-posed convex programs. Lying in the midway between the celebrated Chambolle-Pock primal-dual algorithm and Tseng's accelerated proximal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-03 Mathias Staudigl , Paulin Jacquot

This paper considers unconstrained convex optimization problems with time-varying objective functions. We propose algorithms with a discrete time-sampling scheme to find and track the solution trajectory based on prediction and correction…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-09-18 Andrea Simonetto , Aryan Mokhtari , Alec Koppel , Geert Leus , Alejandro Ribeiro

We introduce the proximal optimal transport divergence, a novel discrepancy measure that interpolates between information divergences and optimal transport distances via an infimal convolution formulation. This divergence provides a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-11 Ricardo Baptista , Panagiota Birmpa , Markos A. Katsoulakis , Luc Rey-Bellet , Benjamin J. Zhang

We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for composite optimization problems with $N$ sequential operators subject to perturbations in both the forward and backward passes. Unlike classical analyses that treat gradient noise as additive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-25 Boao Kong , Hengrui Zhang , Kun Yuan

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for consensus optimization over networks and a robust extension tailored to deal with asynchronous agents and packet losses. Indeed, to robustly achieve dynamic consensus on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Guido Carnevale , Nicola Bastianello , Giuseppe Notarstefano , Ruggero Carli

We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-08 David Kozak , Stephen Becker , Alireza Doostan , Luis Tenorio

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Ruiyang Jin , Yuke Zhou , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Siyang Gao

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

In this work, we establish convergence results for the distributed proximal point algorithm (DPPA) for distributed optimization problems. We consider the problem on the whole domain Rd and find a general condition on the stepsize and cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-11 Woocheol Choi

Recent vision language models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated impressive anomaly detection performance under significant distribution shift by utilizing high-level semantic information through text prompts. However, these models often…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Nadeem Nazer , Hongkuan Zhou , Lavdim Halilaj , Ylli Sadikaj , Steffen Staab

A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Jia Bi , Steve R. Gunn

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

Precision matrix estimation is a fundamental topic in multivariate statistics and modern machine learning. This paper proposes an adversarially perturbed precision matrix estimation framework, motivated by recent developments in adversarial…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-25 Yiling Xie

We consider smooth stochastic convex optimization problems in the context of algorithms which are based on directional derivatives of the objective function. This context can be considered as an intermediate one between derivative-free…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-22 Pavel Dvurechensky , Eduard Gorbunov , Alexander Gasnikov

Variational inference in Bayesian deep learning often involves computing the gradient of an expectation that lacks a closed-form solution. In these cases, pathwise and score-function gradient estimators are the most common approaches. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-10 Kenyon Ng , Susan Wei