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Related papers: Private Zeroth-Order Optimization with Public Data

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In this paper, we focus on solving an important class of nonconvex optimization problems which includes many problems for example signal processing over a networked multi-agent system and distributed learning over networks. Motivated by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-25 Ehsan Kazemi , Liqiang Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Matin Ansaripour , Shayan Talaei , Giorgi Nadiradze , Dan Alistarh

Differentially private gradient descent (DP-GD) is a popular algorithm to train deep learning models with provable guarantees on the privacy of the training data. In the last decade, the problem of understanding its performance cost with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-29 Simone Bombari , Marco Mondelli

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is broadly considered to be the gold standard for training and fine-tuning neural networks under differential privacy (DP). With the increasing availability of high-quality…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-04 Bin Gu , Xiyuan Wei , Hualin Zhang , Yi Chang , Heng Huang

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for smooth stochastic minimax optimization, with stochastic minimization as a byproduct. The holy grail of these settings is to guarantee the optimal trade-off between the privacy and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Liang Zhang , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Niao He

Differential privacy (DP) protects sensitive data during neural network training, but standard methods like DP-Adam suffer from high memory overhead due to per-sample gradient clipping, limiting scalability. We introduce DP-GRAPE (Gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Alex Mulrooney , Devansh Gupta , James Flemings , Huanyu Zhang , Murali Annavaram , Meisam Razaviyayn , Xinwei Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Mayumi Ohta , Nathaniel Berger , Artem Sokolov , Stefan Riezler

We investigate the problem of finding second-order stationary points (SOSP) in differentially private (DP) stochastic non-convex optimization. Existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) inaccurate convergence error rate due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Youming Tao , Zuyuan Zhang , Dongxiao Yu , Xiuzhen Cheng , Falko Dressler , Di Wang

Optimizing large-scale nonconvex problems, common in deep learning, demands balancing rapid convergence with computational efficiency. First-order (FO) optimizers, which serve as today's baselines, provide fast convergence and good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jiahe Chen , Ziye Ma

Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2022-10-31 Elvin Lo , Pin-Yu Chen

In the arena of privacy-preserving machine learning, differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has outstripped the objective perturbation mechanism in popularity and interest. Though unrivaled in versatility, DP-SGD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-02 Rachel Redberg , Antti Koskela , Yu-Xiang Wang

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

Training machine learning models with differential privacy (DP) has received increasing interest in recent years. One of the most popular algorithms for training differentially private models is differentially private stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Aditya Krishna Menon

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for a variety of downstream tasks. However, as LLMs grow in size, the memory demands for backpropagation become increasingly prohibitive. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Ziming Yu , Pan Zhou , Sike Wang , Jia Li , Mi Tian , Hua Huang

We introduce a new zeroth-order algorithm for private stochastic optimization on nonconvex and nonsmooth objectives. Given a dataset of size $M$, our algorithm ensures $(\alpha,\alpha\rho^2/2)$-R\'enyi differential privacy and finds a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-01 Qinzi Zhang , Hoang Tran , Ashok Cutkosky

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization (SCO). In this problem the goal is to approximately minimize the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex and Lipschitz loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Raef Bassily , Vitaly Feldman , Kunal Talwar , Abhradeep Thakurta

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is an emerging deep neural network (DNN) training paradigm that offers computational simplicity and memory savings. However, this seemingly promising approach faces a significant and long-ignored challenge. ZO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Qitao Tan , Sung-En Chang , Rui Xia , Huidong Ji , Chence Yang , Ci Zhang , Jun Liu , Zheng Zhan , Zhenman Fang , Zhou Zou , Yanzhi Wang , Jin Lu , Geng Yuan

We study the problem of private online learning, specifically, online prediction from experts (OPE) and online convex optimization (OCO). We propose a new transformation that transforms lazy online learning algorithms into private…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Hilal Asi , Tomer Koren , Daogao Liu , Kunal Talwar

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