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Related papers: Zeroth-Order Nonconvex Nonsmooth Optimization with…

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We study the complexity of optimizing nonsmooth nonconvex Lipschitz functions by producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points. Several recent works have presented randomized algorithms that produce such points using $\tilde…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Michael I. Jordan , Guy Kornowski , Tianyi Lin , Ohad Shamir , Manolis Zampetakis

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-14 Innokentiy Shibaev , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

We study the oracle complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz functions, in the sense proposed by Zhang et al. [2020]. While there exist dimension-free randomized algorithms for producing such points within…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-01 Guy Kornowski , Ohad Shamir

Nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems broadly emerge in machine learning and business decision making, whereas two core challenges impede the development of efficient solution methods with finite-time convergence guarantee: the lack of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Tianyi Lin , Zeyu Zheng , Michael I. Jordan

This paper considers the problem of asynchronous stochastic nonconvex optimization with heavy-tailed gradient noise and arbitrarily heterogeneous computation times across workers. We propose an asynchronous normalized stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-28 Yidong Wu , Luo Luo

This work considers the problem of finding a first-order stationary point of a non-convex function with potentially unbounded smoothness constant using a stochastic gradient oracle. We focus on the class of $(L_0,L_1)$-smooth functions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Matthew Faw , Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

We present a novel gradient-free algorithm to solve a convex stochastic optimization problem, such as those encountered in medicine, physics, and machine learning (e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit problem), where the objective function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-22 Georgii Bychkov , Darina Dvinskikh , Anastasia Antsiferova , Alexander Gasnikov , Aleksandr Lobanov

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

We study the problem of finding an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point (FOSP) of a smooth function, given access only to gradient information. The best-known gradient query complexity for this task, assuming both the gradient and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-04 Ruichen Jiang , Aryan Mokhtari , Francisco Patitucci

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-27 Yining Wang , Simon Du , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Aarti Singh

In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Prashant Khanduri , Ioannis Tsaknakis , Yihua Zhang , Sijia Liu , Mingyi Hong

A regularization algorithm allowing random noise in derivatives and inexact function values is proposed for computing approximate local critical points of any order for smooth unconstrained optimization problems. For an objective function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-07 S. Bellavia , G. Gurioli , B. Morini , Ph. L. Toint

Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function so that along the iterations the objective function decreases. Such a simple principle allows to solve a large…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-04 Ion Necoara , Daniela Lupu

We consider the computation of an approximately stationary point for a Lipschitz and semialgebraic function $f$ with a local oracle. If $f$ is smooth, simple deterministic methods have dimension-free finite oracle complexities. For the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-14 Lai Tian , Anthony Man-Cho So

Recently, the study of heavy-tailed noises in first-order nonconvex stochastic optimization has gotten a lot of attention since it was recognized as a more realistic condition as suggested by many empirical observations. Specifically, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-30 Zijian Liu , Zhengyuan Zhou

In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-22 Minghan Yang , Andre Milzarek , Zaiwen Wen , Tong Zhang

We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-24 Sashank J. Reddi , Suvrit Sra , Barnabas Poczos , Alex Smola

In this work, we consider bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent works show that with a Hessian-vector product (HVP) oracle, one can provably find an $\epsilon$-stationary point within…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Lesi Chen , Yaohua Ma , Jingzhao Zhang

Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-16 Ryota Nozawa , Pierre-Louis Poirion , Akiko Takeda

We propose a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method for constrained optimization of a composition of several nonsmooth and nonconvex functions. The functions are assumed to be locally Lipschitz and differentiable in a generalized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-22 Andrzej Ruszczynski