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Article
Black-Box Reductions for Zeroth-Order Gradient Algorithms to Achieve Lower Query Complexity
Journal of Machine Learning Research
  • Bin Gu, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Xiyuan Wei, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology
  • Shangqian Gao, University of Pittsburgh
  • Ziran Xiong, JD Finance America Corporation
  • Heng Huang, University of Pittsburgh
Document Type
Article
Abstract

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has been the key technique for various machine learning applications especially for black-box adversarial attack, where models need to be learned in a gradient-free manner. Although many ZO algorithms have been proposed, the high function query complexities hinder their applications seriously. To address this challenging problem, we propose two stagewise black-box reduction frameworks for ZO algorithms under convex and non-convex settings respectively, which lower down the function query complexities of ZO algorithms. Moreover, our frameworks can directly derive the convergence results of ZO algorithms under convex and non-convex settings without extra analyses, as long as convergence results under strongly convex setting are given. To illustrate the advantages, we further study ZO-SVRG, ZO-SAGA and ZO-Varag under strongly-convex setting and use our frameworks to directly derive the convergence results under convex and non-convex settings. The function query complexities of these algorithms derived by our frameworks are lower than that of their vanilla counterparts without frameworks, or even lower than that of state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally we conduct numerical experiments to illustrate the superiority of our frameworks.

Publication Date
6-1-2021
Keywords
  • Black-box reduction,
  • Convex optimization,
  • Non-convex optimization,
  • Stagewise training,
  • Zeroth order optimization
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Citation Information
B. Gu, X. Wei, S. Gao, Z. Xiong, C, Deng, and H. Huang, “Black-Box reductions for zeroth-order gradient algorithms to achieve lower query complexity,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 22, pp. 1-47, 2021, https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/v22/20-611.html.