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We address the problem of \emph{convex optimization with dueling feedback}, where the goal is to minimize a convex function given a weaker form of \emph{dueling} feedback. Each query consists of two points and the dueling feedback returns a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-07 Aadirupa Saha , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-10 Huaiyi Mu , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Zhongkui Li

Constrained Optimization solution algorithms are restricted to point based solutions. In practice, single or multiple objectives must be satisfied, wherein both the objective function and constraints can be non-convex resulting in multiple…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Gurpreet Singh , Soumyajit Gupta , Matthew Lease

A parametric class of trust-region algorithms for constrained nonconvex optimization is analyzed, where the objective function is never computed. By defining appropriate first-order stationarity criteria, we are able to extend the Adagrad…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-04 Serge Gratton , Sadok Jerad , Philippe L. Toint

Discrete optimization problems often arise in deep learning tasks, despite the fact that neural networks typically operate on continuous data. One class of these problems involve objective functions which depend on neural networks, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Eric Lei , Arman Adibi , Hamed Hassani

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

Bilevel optimization has been developed for many machine learning tasks with large-scale and high-dimensional data. This paper considers a constrained bilevel optimization problem, where the lower-level optimization problem is convex with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

This paper presents a subgradient-based algorithm for constrained nonsmooth convex optimization that does not require projections onto the feasible set. While the well-established Frank-Wolfe algorithm and its variants already avoid…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Kamiar Asgari , Michael J. Neely

This paper studies the distributed optimization problem when the objective functions might be nondifferentiable and subject to heterogeneous set constraints. Unlike existing subgradient methods, we focus on the case when the exact…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-23 Kui Zhu , Yutao Tang

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

We introduce a model of infinite horizon linear dynamic optimization and obtain results concerning existence of solution and satisfaction of the competitive condition and transversality condition being unconditionally sufficient for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-23 Somdeb Lahiri

A gradient-free deterministic method is developed to solve global optimization problems for Lipschitz continuous functions defined in arbitrary path-wise connected compact sets in Euclidean spaces. The method can be regarded as granular…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-15 Tao Qian , Lei Dai , Liming Zhang , Zehua Chen

We study the query complexity of min-max optimization of a nonconvex-nonconcave function $f$ over $[0,1]^d \times [0,1]^d$. We show that, given oracle access to $f$ and to its gradient $\nabla f$, any algorithm that finds an…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Alexandros Hollender

Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Kaiyi Ji

In this paper, we study optimization methods consisting of iteratively minimizing surrogates of an objective function. By proposing several algorithmic variants and simple convergence analyses, we make two main contributions. First, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-05-15 Julien Mairal

In this paper, we introduce a new functional point of view on bilevel optimization problems for machine learning, where the inner objective is minimized over a function space. These types of problems are most often solved by using methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-10 Ieva Petrulionyte , Julien Mairal , Michael Arbel

We study inverse optimization (IO), where the goal is to use a parametric optimization program as the hypothesis class to infer relationships between input-decision pairs. Most of the literature focuses on learning only the objective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-22 Ke Ren , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Angelos Georghiou

DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) has become a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm due to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO is prone to overfitting and collapse. To address these challenges, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rui Wang , Qianguo Sun , Chao Song , Junlong Wu , Tianrong Chen , Zhiyun Zeng , Yu Li

In this work, we consider methods for solving large-scale optimization problems with a possibly nonsmooth objective function. The key idea is to first specify a class of optimization algorithms using a generic iterative scheme involving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-19 Sebastian Banert , Axel Ringh , Jonas Adler , Johan Karlsson , Ozan Öktem

We study the question of whether parallelization in the exploration of the feasible set can be used to speed up convex optimization, in the local oracle model of computation. We show that the answer is negative for both deterministic and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-21 Jelena Diakonikolas , Cristóbal Guzmán