Distributed Stochastic Zeroth-Order Optimization With Compressed Communication

Youqing Hua

doi:10.1109/TAC.2025.3610109

Distributed Stochastic Zeroth-Order Optimization With Compressed Communication

2025-09-16

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DOI：10.1109/TAC.2025.3610109

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The dual challenges of high communication costs and gradient inaccessibility—common in privacy-sensitive systems or black-box environments—drive our work on communication-constrained, gradient-free distributed optimization. We propose a compressed distributed stochastic zeroth-order algorithm (Com-DSZO), which requires only two function evaluations per iteration and incorporates general compression operators. Rigorous analysis establishes a sublinear convergence rate for both smooth and nonsmooth objectives, explicitly characterizing the tradeoff between compression and convergence. Furthermore, we develop a variance-reduced variant (VR-Com-DSZO) under stochastic minibatch feedback. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated through numerical experiments.

Keywords:

Compressed communication

multiagent systems

stochastic distributed optimization

zeroth-order optimization

Distributed Stochastic Zeroth-Order Optimization With Compressed Communication

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