Related papers: High-Probability Guarantees for Random Zeroth-Orde…
Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…
In this paper, we consider two distinct challenges in the resolution of nonsmooth stochastic optimization. Of these, the first pertains to the pronounced dependence of dimension in Gaussian smoothing-enabled zeroth-order schemes, impeding…
This paper develops negative curvature methods for continuous nonlinear unconstrained optimization in stochastic settings, in which function, gradient, and Hessian information is available only through probabilistic oracles, i.e., oracles…
We consider the problem of optimising the expected value of a loss functional over a nonlinear model class of functions, assuming that we have only access to realisations of the gradient of the loss. This is a classical task in statistics,…
Universal methods for optimization are designed to achieve theoretically optimal convergence rates without any prior knowledge of the problem's regularity parameters or the accurarcy of the gradient oracle employed by the optimizer. In this…
In this paper, we prove new complexity bounds for zeroth-order methods in non-convex optimization with inexact observations of the objective function values. We use the Gaussian smoothing approach of Nesterov and Spokoiny [2015] and extend…
We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
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…
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…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
Algorithmic reproducibility measures the deviation in outputs of machine learning algorithms upon minor changes in the training process. Previous work suggests that first-order methods would need to trade-off convergence rate (gradient…
In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and…
Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…
We consider the problem of optimizing a high-dimensional convex function using stochastic zeroth-order queries. Under sparsity assumptions on the gradients or function values, we present two algorithms: a successive component/feature…
We consider the stochastic gradient method with random reshuffling ($\mathsf{RR}$) for tackling smooth nonconvex optimization problems. $\mathsf{RR}$ finds broad applications in practice, notably in training neural networks. In this work,…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…