Related papers: High-Probability Guarantees for Random Zeroth-Orde…
This paper addresses the study of derivative-free smooth optimization problems, where the gradient information on the objective function is unavailable. Two novel general derivative-free methods are proposed and developed for minimizing…
We study the oracle complexity of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization, with the algorithm assumed to have access only to local function information. It has been shown by Davis, Drusvyatskiy, and Jiang (2023) that for nonsmooth Lipschitz…
In this work, we describe a generic approach to show convergence with high probability for stochastic convex optimization. In previous works, either the convergence is only in expectation or the bound depends on the diameter of the domain.…
Consider the problem of minimizing functions that are Lipschitz and strongly convex, but not necessarily differentiable. We prove that after $T$ steps of stochastic gradient descent, the error of the final iterate is $O(\log(T)/T)$ with…
In this paper, we present several new results on minimizing a nonsmooth and nonconvex function under a Lipschitz condition. Recent work shows that while the classical notion of Clarke stationarity is computationally intractable up to some…
We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…
We provide sharp path-dependent generalization and excess risk guarantees for the full-batch Gradient Descent (GD) algorithm on smooth losses (possibly non-Lipschitz, possibly nonconvex). At the heart of our analysis is an upper bound on…
This work provides the first convergence analysis for the Randomized Block Coordinate Descent method for minimizing a function that is both H\"older smooth and block H\"older smooth. Our analysis applies to objective functions that are…
Black-box variational inference tries to approximate a complex target distribution though a gradient-based optimization of the parameters of a simpler distribution. Provable convergence guarantees require structural properties of the…
We study the optimization of non-convex functions that are not necessarily smooth (gradient and/or Hessian are Lipschitz) using first order methods. Smoothness is a restrictive assumption in machine learning in both theory and practice,…
We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…
In this work, we develop new optimization algorithms that use approximate second-order information combined with the gradient regularization technique to achieve fast global convergence rates for both convex and non-convex objectives. The…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
We propose a derivative-free trust-region method based on finite-difference gradient approximations for smooth optimization problems with convex constraints. The proposed method does not require computing an approximate stationarity…
We propose and analyze a randomized zeroth-order approach based on approximating the exact gradient byfinite differences computed in a set of orthogonal random directions that changes with each iteration. A number ofpreviously proposed…
Probabilistic smoothing is a standard tool for global optimization, but existing methods rely on Gaussian kernels and specific transforms, often resulting in strong hyperparameter sensitivity and limited robustness. We propose a general…
We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…
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…
This paper considers optimization of smooth nonconvex functionals in smooth infinite dimensional spaces. A H\"older gradient descent algorithm is first proposed for finding approximate first-order points of regularized polynomial…