Related papers: Nonlinear-Gain Distributed Zeroth-Order Optimizati…

As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive…

Distributed optimization advances centralized machine learning methods by enabling parallel and decentralized learning processes over a network of computing nodes. This work provides an accelerated consensus-based distributed algorithm for…

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…

Existing reward alignment methods for diffusion and flow models rely on multi-step stochastic trajectories, making them difficult to extend to deterministic generators. A natural alternative is noise-space optimization, but existing…

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…

We consider the zeroth-order optimization problem in the huge-scale setting, where the dimension of the problem is so large that performing even basic vector operations on the decision variables is infeasible. In this paper, we propose a…

This paper considers zeroth-order optimization for stochastic convex minimization problem. We propose a parameter-free stochastic zeroth-order method (POEM) by introducing a step-size scheme based on the distance over finite difference and…

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)…

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…

The goal of offline black-box optimization (BBO) is to optimize an expensive black-box function using a fixed dataset of function evaluations. Prior works consider forward approaches that learn surrogates to the black-box function and…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer…

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…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, learning from finite differences of function evaluations without backpropagation, has recently regained attention in deep learning due to its memory efficiency and applicability to gray- or black-box…

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…

In this paper, we propose a model-free feedback solution method to solve generic constrained optimization problems, without knowing the specific formulations of the objective and constraint functions. This solution method is termed…

Global optimization of expensive, derivative-free black-box functions requires extreme sample efficiency. While Bayesian optimization (BO) is the current state-of-the-art, its performance hinges on surrogate and acquisition function…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) algorithms have been recently used to solve black-box or simulation-based learning and control problems, where the gradient of the objective function cannot be easily computed but can be approximated using the…

Zeroth-order (a.k.a, derivative-free) methods are a class of effective optimization methods for solving complex machine learning problems, where gradients of the objective functions are not available or computationally prohibitive.…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become increasingly popular and important in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), especially on edge devices due to its ability to adjust the model to local data without the need for memory-intensive…

We study (constrained) nonconvex (composite) optimization problems where the decision variables vector can be split into blocks of variables. Random block projection is a popular technique to handle this kind of problem for its remarkable…