Pith. sign in

REVIEW 3 cited by

Query Complexity of Derivative-Free Optimization

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1209.2434 v1 pith:EI2EIKNJ submitted 2012-09-11 stat.ML cs.LG

classification stat.MLcs.LG
keywords functionevaluationsalgorithmcomparisonsoptimizationaccessboolean-valuedconvergence
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

This paper provides lower bounds on the convergence rate of Derivative Free Optimization (DFO) with noisy function evaluations, exposing a fundamental and unavoidable gap between the performance of algorithms with access to gradients and those with access to only function evaluations. However, there are situations in which DFO is unavoidable, and for such situations we propose a new DFO algorithm that is proved to be near optimal for the class of strongly convex objective functions. A distinctive feature of the algorithm is that it uses only Boolean-valued function comparisons, rather than function evaluations. This makes the algorithm useful in an even wider range of applications, such as optimization based on paired comparisons from human subjects, for example. We also show that regardless of whether DFO is based on noisy function evaluations or Boolean-valued function comparisons, the convergence rate is the same.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. When cheap gradients fail: the measurement cost of attacking quantum classifiers

    quant-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Unbiased gradient extraction for attacking quantum classifiers costs at least Θ(d^{5/2}) shots under norm-concentration scaling, and ~d³ for tested deep circuits, so the attacker's relative cost diverges versus classi...

  2. Finding Stationary Points by Comparisons

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Presents classical Õ(n²/ε^{1.5}) and quantum Õ(n/ε^{1.5}) query algorithms for ε-stationary points of twice-differentiable non-convex functions with Lipschitz gradient and Hessian via comparison oracles.

  3. Optimization over Sparse Support-Preserving Sets: Two-Step Projection with Global Optimality Guarantees

    math.OC 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    An iterative hard-thresholding variant with a two-step projection offers global objective-value guarantees for sparse optimization with support-preserving convex constraints, including the first zeroth-order hard-thre...

Pith tools