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This paper investigates a class of stochastic bilevel optimization problems where the upper-level function is nonconvex with potentially unbounded smoothness and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. These problems have significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Xiaochuan Gong , Jie Hao , Mingrui Liu

In this paper, we study a fixed-confidence, fixed-tolerance formulation of a class of stochastic bi-level optimization problems, where the upper-level problem selects from a finite set of systems based on a performance metric, and the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-20 Yuhao Wang , Seong-Hee Kim , Enlu Zhou

This paper investigates simple bilevel optimization problems where we minimize an upper-level objective over the optimal solution set of a convex lower-level objective. Existing methods for such problems either only guarantee asymptotic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-05 Pengyu Chen , Xu Shi , Rujun Jiang , Jiulin Wang

Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Sajad Khodadadian , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg , Siva Theja Maguluri

We study a class of bilevel optimization problems in which both the upper- and lower-level problems have minimax structures. This setting captures a broad range of emerging applications. Despite the extensive literature on bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Yiyang Shen , Yutian He , Weiran Wang , Qihang Lin

Constrained bilevel optimization tackles nested structures present in constrained learning tasks like constrained meta-learning, adversarial learning, and distributed bilevel optimization. However, existing bilevel optimization methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-05 Wei Yao , Haian Yin , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang

Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Zhuoran Yang , Yongxin Chen , Mingyi Hong , Zhaoran Wang

In this paper, we study multi-block min-max bilevel optimization problems, where the upper level is non-convex strongly-concave minimax objective and the lower level is a strongly convex objective, and there are multiple blocks of dual…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-22 Quanqi Hu , Yongjian Zhong , Tianbao Yang

Bilevel optimization is an important formulation for many machine learning problems. Current bilevel optimization algorithms assume that the gradient of the upper-level function is Lipschitz. However, recent studies reveal that certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Jie Hao , Xiaochuan Gong , Mingrui Liu

Bilevel optimization has been applied to a wide variety of machine learning models, and numerous stochastic bilevel optimization algorithms have been developed in recent years. However, most existing algorithms restrict their focus on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Hongchang Gao , Bin Gu , My T. Thai

Bilevel optimization problems are receiving increasing attention in machine learning as they provide a natural framework for hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. A key step to tackle these problems is the efficient computation of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Riccardo Grazzi , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo

In this work, we study first-order algorithms for solving Bilevel Optimization (BO) where the objective functions are smooth but possibly nonconvex in both levels and the variables are restricted to closed convex sets. As a first step, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-13 Jeongyeol Kwon , Dohyun Kwon , Stephen Wright , Robert Nowak

Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Yin Liu , Sam Davanloo Tajbakhsh

In this paper, we propose the Bi-Sub-Gradient (Bi-SG) method, which is a generalization of the classical sub-gradient method to the setting of convex bi-level optimization problems. This is a first-order method that is very easy to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-18 Roey Merchav , Shoham Sabach

In this letter, we consider a bilevel optimization problem in which the outer-level objective function is strongly convex, whereas the inner-level problem consists of a finite sum of convex functions. Bilevel optimization problems arise in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Sudkobfa Boontawee , Mootta Prangprakhon , Nimit Nimana

Stochastic bilevel optimization, which captures the inherent nested structure of machine learning problems, is gaining popularity in many recent applications. Existing works on bilevel optimization mostly consider either unconstrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Quan Xiao , Han Shen , Wotao Yin , Tianyi Chen

This paper studies convergence properties of inexact iterative solution schemes for bilevel optimization problems. Bilevel optimization problems emerge in control-aware design optimization, where the system design parameters are optimized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-26 Torbjørn Cunis Ilya Kolmanovsky

Bilevel optimization has found successful applications in various machine learning problems, including hyper-parameter optimization, data cleaning, and meta-learning. However, its huge computational cost presents a significant challenge for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Xiaoyu Wang , Rui Pan , Renjie Pi , Jipeng Zhang

Bilevel optimization problems embed the optimality of a subproblem as a constraint of another optimization problem. We introduce the concept of near-optimality robustness for bilevel optimization, protecting the upper-level solution…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-15 Mathieu Besançon , Miguel F. Anjos , Luce Brotcorne

In this paper, we introduce a new functional point of view on bilevel optimization problems for machine learning, where the inner objective is minimized over a function space. These types of problems are most often solved by using methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-10 Ieva Petrulionyte , Julien Mairal , Michael Arbel