Related papers: Stochastic Zeroth-Order Optimization Under Heavy-T…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success across various NLP tasks, but the substantial memory overhead during backpropagation remains a critical bottleneck, especially as model scales grow. Zeroth-order (ZO)…

We initiate the study of stochastic optimization with oblivious noise, broadly generalizing the standard heavy-tailed noise setup. In our setting, in addition to random observation noise, the stochastic gradient may be subject to…

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 study high-probability convergence guarantees of learning on streaming data in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. In the proposed scenario, the model is updated in an online fashion, as new information is observed, without storing any…

Fine-tuning large pretrained language models (LLMs) is a cornerstone of modern NLP, yet its growing memory demands (driven by backpropagation and large optimizer States) limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Zero-order (ZO)…

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, also known as derivative-free) methods, which estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, have attracted much attention recently because of its broad applications in machine learning community. The two function…

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…

In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…

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…

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…

We develop a worst-case complexity theory for stochastically preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (SPSGD) and its accelerated variants under heavy-tailed noise, a setting that encompasses widely used adaptive methods such as Adam,…

An increasing number of studies have focused on stochastic first-order methods (SFOMs) under heavy-tailed gradient noises, which have been observed in the training of practical deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on two types of…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a subset of gradient-free optimization that emerges in many signal processing and machine learning applications. It is used for solving optimization problems similarly to gradient-based methods. However, it…

Zeroth-order optimization methods are developed to overcome the practical hurdle of having knowledge of explicit derivatives. Instead, these schemes work with merely access to noisy functions evaluations. One of the predominant approaches…

Optimization under heavy-tailed noise has become popular recently, since it better fits many modern machine learning tasks, as captured by empirical observations. Concretely, instead of a finite second moment on gradient noise, a bounded…

In this paper, we provide novel optimal (or near optimal) convergence rates for a clipped version of the stochastic subgradient method. We consider nonsmooth convex problems over possibly unbounded domains, under heavy-tailed noise that…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a gradient-free alternative to first-order (FO) methods by estimating gradients via finite differences of function evaluations, and has recently emerged as a memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning…

We provide a novel computer-assisted technique for systematically analyzing first-order methods for optimization. In contrast with previous works, the approach is particularly suited for handling sublinear convergence rates and stochastic…

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…