Highly Smooth Zeroth-Order Methods for Solving Optimization Problems under the PL Condition

Abstract

In this paper, we study the black box optimization problem under the Polyak–Lojasiewicz (PL) condition, assuming that the objective function is not just smooth, but has higher smoothness. By using “kernel-based” approximations instead of the exact gradient in the Stochastic Gradient Descent method, we improve the best-known results of convergence in the class of gradient-free algorithms solving problems under the PL condition. We generalize our results to the case where a zeroth-order oracle returns a function value at a point with some adversarial noise. We verify our theoretical results on the example of solving a system of nonlinear equations.