arXiv Machine Learning By Yangyang Feng, Yao Shu

ZoAQ: Adaptive Zeroth-Order Querying via Query-Reuse Coupling

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ZoAQ is an adaptive zeroth-order optimization method that reuses past function evaluations to inform both the next update and the decision to query further, eliminating the need for extra validation queries. The approach achieves significant query savings—43–48% fewer queries than fixed-budget baselines on synthetic tasks—and demonstrates strong performance in black-box adversarial attacks, achieving 100% success with 320 and 625 average queries on MNIST and CIFAR-10. In fine-tuning experiments across four settings, ZoAQ reduces forward evaluations by 43–46% while maintaining accuracy within ±0.018 to +0.010.

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