Dept. of Comp. Sci. and Tech., BNRist Center, State Key Lab for Intell. Tech. & Sys., Institute for AI, Tsinghua-Bosch Joint Center for ML, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China
Country
China
Conference
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
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Abstract
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is widely used to handle challenging tasks,
such as query-based black-box adversarial attacks and reinforcement learning.
Various attempts have been made to integrate prior information into the
gradient estimation procedure based on finite differences, with promising
empirical results. However, their convergence properties are not well
understood. This paper makes an attempt to fill up this gap by analyzing the
convergence of prior-guided ZO algorithms under a greedy descent framework with
various gradient estimators. We provide a convergence guarantee for the
prior-guided random gradient-free (PRGF) algorithms. Moreover, to further
accelerate over greedy descent methods, we present a new accelerated random
search (ARS) algorithm that incorporates prior information, together with a
convergence analysis. Finally, our theoretical results are confirmed by
experiments on several numerical benchmarks as well as adversarial attacks.