About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
ICLR 2019
Conference paper
SignsGD via zeroth-order oracle
Abstract
In this paper, we design and analyze a new zeroth-order (ZO) stochastic optimization algorithm, ZO-signSGD, which enjoys dual advantages of gradient-free operations and signSGD. The latter requires only the sign information of gradient estimates but is able to achieve a comparable or even better convergence speed than SGD-type algorithms. Our study shows that ZO-signSGD requires √d times more iterations than signSGD, leading to a convergence rate of O(√d/√T) under some mild conditions, where d is the number of optimization variables, and T is the number of iterations. In addition, we analyze the effects of different types of gradient estimators on the convergence of ZO-signSGD, and propose several variants of ZO-signSGD with O(√d/√T) convergence rate. On the application side we explore the connection between ZO-signSGD and black-box adversarial attacks in robust deep learning. Our empirical evaluations on image classification datasets MNIST and CIFAR-10 demonstrate the superior performance of ZO-signSGD on the generation of adversarial examples from black-box neural networks.