3 papers
math.OC2026
Stochastic Zeroth-Order Optimization Under Heavy-Tailed Noise
Taha El Bakkali, El Mahdi Chayti, Qiuyi Zhang +2
We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that grad…
math.OC2026
Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization from Noisy Comparisons: Unbiased Gap Estimation and the Price of Preference Feedback
Taha El Bakkali, El Mahdi Chayti, Omar Saadi
We study the minimization of -Lipschitz, possibly nonsmooth and nonconvex from noisy pairwise comparisons: comparing and returns a bit equal to with pro…
math.OC2026
Noisy Pairwise-Comparison Random Search for Smooth Nonconvex Optimization
Taha El Bakkali, Rayane Bouftini, Qiuyi Zhang +1
We study smooth nonconvex optimization using only noisy pairwise comparisons, without access to gradients or function values. We propose Noisy-Comparison Random Search (NCRS), a si…