In many real-world problems, first-order (FO) derivative evaluations are too expensive or even inaccessible. For solving these zeroth-order (ZO) methods that only need function often more efficient than FO sometimes the options. this paper, we propose a novel inexact augmented Lagrangian method (ZO-iALM) to solve black-box optimization which involve composite (i.e., smooth+nonsmooth) objective ...

We present Free-MESSAGEp, the first zeroth-order algorithm for convex mean-semideviation-based risk-aware learning, which is also three-level compositional stochastic optimization algorithm, whatsoever. Using a non-trivial extension of Nesterov's classical results on Gaussian smoothing, we develop Free-MESSAGEp from principles, and show that it essentially solves smoothed surrogate to original ...

In this paper we describe a semianalytical approach to computing the temperature and thermal stress inside a III-V compound grown with the Czochralski technique. An analysis of the growing conditions indicates that the crystal growth occurs on the conductive time scale. A perturbation method for the temperature field is developed for an arbitrary crystal profile using the Biot number as a (smal...

The motions of relativistic particles in a magnetosonic shock wave propagating obliquely to an external magnetic field are studied. In the zeroth-order theory, particles continue to move nearly parallel to the external magnetic field in the shock transition region, when the shock speed is close to c cos θ, where c is the speed of light and θ is the propagation angle. Perturbations to this zerot...

The cancellation of the 0th order is described by a low-contrast fused-silica grating. In reported works, the high-contrast grating and complicated structure were applied with reasonable and excellent performance. However, the low-contrast grating is proved that it can also cancel the 0th order with the period more than 2λ in this paper. Grating parameters are optimized by using rigorous couple...

We show that the zeroth cohomology of effective line bundles on del Pezzo and Hirzebruch surfaces can always be computed in terms a topological index.

We consider the problem of minimizing a high-dimensional objective function, which may include regularization term, using only (possibly noisy) evaluations function. Such optimization is also called derivative-free, zeroth-order, or black-box optimization. propose new zeroth-order regularized method, dubbed ZORO. When underlying gradient approximately sparse at an iterate, ZORO needs very few f...

We present the first high-resolution, X-ray image of the circumnuclear regions of the Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 3516, using the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO). All three of the CXO observations reported were performed with one of the two grating assemblies in place, and here we restrict our analysis to undispersed photons (i.e. those detected in the zeroth-order). A previously-unknown X-ray source ...

We present a statistical strategy for the efficient determination of the cluster luminosity function from the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effects survey. The strategy is set up to match in particular the upcoming AMiBA (Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy) experiment. To determine the cluster luminosity function from the noise contaminated SZ map, we first define the zeroth-order cluster lumi...