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Related papers: Private Zeroth-Order Optimization with Public Data

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Differentially private (DP) stochastic convex optimization (SCO) is ubiquitous in trustworthy machine learning algorithm design. This paper studies the DP-SCO problem with streaming data sampled from a distribution and arrives sequentially.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Yuxuan Han , Zhicong Liang , Zhipeng Liang , Yang Wang , Yuan Yao , Jiheng 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

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) with the Adam optimizer often demands excessive memory, limiting accessibility. The "in-place" version of Stochastic Gradient Descent (IP-SGD) and Memory-Efficient Zeroth-order Optimizer (MeZO) have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zeman Li , Xinwei Zhang , Peilin Zhong , Yuan Deng , Meisam Razaviyayn , Vahab Mirrokni

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Hassan Dbouk , Nidham Gazagnadou , Matthias Reisser , Christos Louizos

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has demonstrated success in a wide array of downstream tasks. However, as LMs are scaled up, the memory requirements for backpropagation become prohibitively high. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Tanmay Gautam , Youngsuk Park , Hao Zhou , Parameswaran Raman , Wooseok Ha

In this paper, we consider a stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem with the cost function being distributed over $n$ agents having access only to zeroth-order (ZO) information of the cost. This problem has various machine…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-11 Xinlei Yi , Shengjun Zhang , Tao Yang , Karl H. Johansson

Differential privacy (DP) is the standard for privacy-preserving analysis, and introduces a fundamental trade-off between privacy guarantees and model performance. Selecting the optimal balance is a critical challenge that can be framed as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yaohong Yang , Aki Rehn , Sammie Katt , Antti Honkela , Samuel Kaski

Differential privacy (DP) is a prominent method for protecting information about individuals during data analysis. Training neural networks with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD) influences the model's learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Lea Demelius , Dominik Kowald , Simone Kopeinik , Roman Kern , Andreas Trügler

Balancing convergence speed, generalization capability, and computational efficiency remains a core challenge in deep learning optimization. First-order gradient descent methods, epitomized by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Adam,…

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) is a standard method for enforcing privacy in deep learning, typically using the Gaussian mechanism to perturb gradient updates. However, conventional mechanisms such as Gaussian…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Qin Yang , Nicholas Stout , Meisam Mohammady , Han Wang , Ayesha Samreen , Christopher J Quinn , Yan Yan , Ashish Kundu , Yuan Hong

Privacy is a growing concern in modern deep-learning systems and applications. Differentially private (DP) training prevents the leakage of sensitive information in the collected training data from the trained machine learning models. DP…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Xinwei Zhang , Zhiqi Bu , Mingyi Hong , Meisam Razaviyayn

Policy optimization (PO) is a cornerstone of modern reinforcement learning (RL), with diverse applications spanning robotics, healthcare, and large language model training. The increasing deployment of PO in sensitive domains, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Yi He , Xingyu Zhou

Adaptive optimizers are the de facto standard in non-private training as they often enable faster convergence and improved performance. In contrast, differentially private (DP) training is still predominantly performed with DP-SGD,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mihaela Hudişteanu , Nikita P. Kalinin , Edwige Cyffers

Differential privacy (DP) ensures that training a machine learning model does not leak private data. In practice, we may have access to auxiliary public data that is free of privacy concerns. In this work, we assume access to a given amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Andrew Lowy , Zeman Li , Tianjian Huang , Meisam Razaviyayn

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include a regularization term, using (possibly noisy) evaluations of the function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-20 HanQin Cai , Daniel Mckenzie , Wotao Yin , Zhenliang Zhang

Differential Privacy (DP) provides a formal privacy guarantee preventing adversaries with access to a machine learning model from extracting information about individual training points. Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Soham De , Leonard Berrada , Jamie Hayes , Samuel L. Smith , Borja Balle

An open problem in differentially private deep learning is hyperparameter optimization (HPO). DP-SGD introduces new hyperparameters and complicates existing ones, forcing researchers to painstakingly tune hyperparameters with hundreds of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Ashwinee Panda , Xinyu Tang , Saeed Mahloujifar , Vikash Sehwag , Prateek Mittal

Differential privacy (DP) is a popular mechanism for training machine learning models with bounded leakage about the presence of specific points in the training data. The cost of differential privacy is a reduction in the model's accuracy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Eugene Bagdasaryan , Vitaly Shmatikov