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Poster

Accelerated Stochastic Gradient-free and Projection-free Methods

Feihu Huang · Lue Tao · Songcan Chen

Keywords: [ Adversarial Examples ] [ Non-convex Optimization ] [ Optimization - Non-convex ]


Abstract: In the paper, we propose a class of accelerated stochastic gradient-free and projection-free (a.k.a., zeroth-order Frank-Wolfe) methods to solve the constrained stochastic and finite-sum nonconvex optimization. Specifically, we propose an accelerated stochastic zeroth-order Frank-Wolfe (Acc-SZOFW) method based on the variance reduced technique of SPIDER/SpiderBoost and a novel momentum accelerated technique. Moreover, under some mild conditions, we prove that the Acc-SZOFW has the function query complexity of O(dnϵ2) for finding an ϵ-stationary point in the finite-sum problem, which improves the exiting best result by a factor of O(nϵ2), and has the function query complexity of O(dϵ3) in the stochastic problem, which improves the exiting best result by a factor of O(ϵ1). To relax the large batches required in the Acc-SZOFW, we further propose a novel accelerated stochastic zeroth-order Frank-Wolfe (Acc-SZOFW*) based on a new variance reduced technique of STORM, which still reaches the function query complexity of O(dϵ3) in the stochastic problem without relying on any large batches. In particular, we present an accelerated framework of the Frank-Wolfe methods based on the proposed momentum accelerated technique. The extensive experimental results on black-box adversarial attack and robust black-box classification demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms.

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