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Classical results show that gradient descent converges linearly to minimizers of smooth strongly convex functions. A natural question is whether there exists a locally nearly linearly convergent method for nonsmooth functions with quadratic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-18 Damek Davis , Liwei Jiang

Difference of convex (DC) functions cover a broad family of non-convex and possibly non-smooth and non-differentiable functions, and have wide applications in machine learning and statistics. Although deterministic algorithms for DC…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-05 Yi Xu , Qi Qi , Qihang Lin , Rong Jin , Tianbao Yang

In this paper, we study stochastic optimization of two-level composition of functions without Lipschitz continuous gradient. The smoothness property is generalized by the notion of relative smoothness which provokes the Bregman gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-24 Yin Liu , Sam Davanloo Tajbakhsh

In this paper we consider stochastic weakly convex composite problems, however without the existence of a stochastic subgradient oracle. We present a derivative free algorithm that uses a two point approximation for computing a gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-20 V. Kungurtsev , F. Rinaldi

In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Aleksandr Lobanov , Nail Bashirov , Alexander Gasnikov

This paper studies a stochastic algorithm for linearly constrained nonconvex optimization, where the objective function is smooth but only unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded variance are available. We propose a momentum-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-16 Chenyang Qiu , Mihitha Maithripala , Zongli Lin

We study stochastic nonconvex optimization under heavy-tailed noise. In this setting, the stochastic gradients only have bounded $p$-th central moment ($p$-BCM) for some $p \in (1,2]$. Building on the foundational work of Arjevani et al.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 Adrien Fradin , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Laurent Condat , Peter Richtárik

A new, fast second-order method is proposed that achieves the optimal $\mathcal{O}\left(|\log(\epsilon)|\epsilon^{-3/2}\right)$ complexity to obtain first-order $\epsilon$-stationary points. Crucially, this is deduced without assuming the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Serge Gratton , Sadok Jerad , Philippe L. Toint

We present an accelerated gradient method for non-convex optimization problems with Lipschitz continuous first and second derivatives. The method requires time $O(\epsilon^{-7/4} \log(1/ \epsilon) )$ to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-02-03 Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Oliver Hinder , Aaron Sidford

We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-24 Nuri Mert Vural , Lu Yu , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Stanislav Volgushev , Murat A. Erdogdu

This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Charles Audet , Jean Bigeon , Romain Couderc , Michael Kokkolaras

We consider the stochastic optimization problem with smooth but not necessarily convex objectives in the heavy-tailed noise regime, where the stochastic gradient's noise is assumed to have bounded $p$th moment ($p\in(1,2]$). Zhang et al.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Zijian Liu , Jiawei Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

In a separable real Hilbert space, we study the problem of minimizing a convex function with Lipschitz continuous gradient in the presence of noisy evaluations. To this end, we associate a stochastic Heavy Ball system, incorporating a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Radu Ioan Bot , Chiara Schindler

Optimization problems with access to only zeroth-order information of the objective function on Riemannian manifolds arise in various applications, spanning from statistical learning to robot learning. While various zeroth-order algorithms…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-10 Chang He , Zhaoye Pan , Xiao Wang , Bo Jiang

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Ilias Diakonikolas , Sushrut Karmalkar , Jongho Park , Christos Tzamos

We address the problem of zero-order optimization from noisy observations for an objective function satisfying the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz or the strong convexity condition. Additionally, we assume that the objective function has an additive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Arya Akhavan , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

In large-scale applications, such as machine learning, it is desirable to design non-convex optimization algorithms with a high degree of parallelization. In this work, we study the adaptive complexity of finding a stationary point, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Huanjian Zhou , Andi Han , Akiko Takeda , Masashi Sugiyama

We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-01 Yiming Zhou , Wei Dai

Using double-smoothing technique and stochastic mirror descent with inexact oracle we built an optimal algorithm (up to a multiplicative factor) for two-points gradient-free non-smooth stochastic convex programming. We investigate how much…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-08-15 Anastasia Bayandina , Alexander Gasnikov , Fariman Guliev , Anastasia Lagunovskaya

We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\mathbb{R}^d$ in setting where only function evaluations are possible. We propose and analyze stochastic zeroth-order method with heavy ball momentum.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-18 Eduard Gorbunov , Adel Bibi , Ozan Sener , El Houcine Bergou , Peter Richtárik