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In this paper, we focus on the nonconvex-nonconvex bilevel optimization problem (BLO), where both upper-level and lower-level objectives are nonconvex, with the upper-level problem potentially being nonsmooth. We develop a two-timescale…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Nachuan Xiao , Xiaoyin Hu , Xin Liu , Kim-Chuan Toh

We consider the convex bilevel optimization problem, also known as simple bilevel programming. There are two challenges in solving convex bilevel optimization problems. Firstly, strong duality is not guaranteed due to the lack of Slater…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-29 Khanh-Hung Giang-Tran , Nam Ho-Nguyen , Fatma Kılınç-Karzan , Lingqing Shen

Existing methods for nonconvex bilevel optimization (NBO) require prior knowledge of first- and second-order problem-specific parameters (e.g., Lipschitz constants and the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (P{\L}) parameters) to set step sizes, a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Xu Shi , Yinglin Du , Rufeng Xiao , Rujun Jiang

In recent years, a variety of gradient-based first-order methods have been developed to solve bi-level optimization problems for learning applications. However, theoretical guarantees of these existing approaches heavily rely on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Risheng Liu , Pan Mu , Xiaoming Yuan , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang

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

Learning to Optimize (L2O) is a subfield of machine learning (ML) in which ML models are trained to solve parametric optimization problems. The general goal is to learn a fast approximator of solutions to constrained optimization problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-04 James Kotary , Himanshu Sharma , Ethan King , Draguna Vrabie , Ferdinando Fioretto , Jan Drgona

Quasi-convex optimization acts a pivotal part in many fields including economics and finance; the subgradient method is an effective iterative algorithm for solving large-scale quasi-convex optimization problems. In this paper, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-25 Yaohua Hu , Jiawen Li , Carisa Kwok Wai Yu

Existing decentralized stochastic optimization methods assume the lower-level loss function is strongly convex and the stochastic gradient noise has finite variance. These strong assumptions typically are not satisfied in real-world machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xinwen Zhang , Yihan Zhang , Heng Liang , Hongchang Gao

Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) is originated from the area of economic game theory and then introduced into the optimization community. BLO is able to handle problems with a hierarchical structure, involving two levels of optimization tasks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Risheng Liu , Jiaxin Gao , Jin Zhang , Deyu Meng , Zhouchen Lin

We analyse the convergence of the proximal gradient algorithm for convex composite problems in the presence of gradient and proximal computational inaccuracies. We derive new tighter deterministic and probabilistic bounds that we use to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-07 Anis Hamadouche , Yun Wu , Andrew M. Wallace , Joao F. C. Mota

This paper introduces \textit{online bilevel optimization} in which a sequence of time-varying bilevel problems is revealed one after the other. We extend the known regret bounds for online single-level algorithms to the bilevel setting.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-10 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Parvin Nazari , Bojian Hou , Li Shen , Laura Balzano

This paper introduces and studies the convergence properties of a new class of explicit $\epsilon$-subgradient methods for the task of minimizing a convex function over the set of minimizers of another convex minimization problem. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-03 Elias Salomão Helou , Lucas Eduardo Azevedo Simões

Practical optimization problems may contain different kinds of difficulties that are often not tractable if one relies on a particular optimization method. Different optimization approaches offer different strengths that are good at…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Ankur Sinha , Dhaval Pujara , Hemant Kumar Singh

In optimization-based image restoration models, the correct selection of hyperparameters is crucial for achieving superior performance. However, current research typically involves manual tuning of these hyperparameters, which is highly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Hang Xie , Xuewen Li , Peili Li , Qiuyu Wang

Bilevel optimization formulates hierarchical decision-making processes that arise in many real-world applications such as in pricing, network design, and infrastructure defense planning. In this paper, we consider a class of bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-20 Geunyeong Byeon , Pascal Van Hentenryck

Stochastic bilevel optimization finds widespread applications in machine learning, including meta-learning, hyperparameter optimization, and neural architecture search. To extend stochastic bilevel optimization to distributed data, several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yihan Zhang , My T. Thai , Jie Wu , Hongchang Gao

Mini-batch algorithms have been proposed as a way to speed-up stochastic convex optimization problems. We study how such algorithms can be improved using accelerated gradient methods. We provide a novel analysis, which shows how standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-24 Andrew Cotter , Ohad Shamir , Nathan Srebro , Karthik Sridharan

Although application examples of multilevel optimization have already been discussed since the 1990s, the development of solution methods was almost limited to bilevel cases due to the difficulty of the problem. In recent years, in machine…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-27 Ryo Sato , Mirai Tanaka , Akiko Takeda

In this paper, we consider non-convex multi-block bilevel optimization (MBBO) problems, which involve $m\gg 1$ lower level problems and have important applications in machine learning. Designing a stochastic gradient and controlling its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-05 Quanqi Hu , Zi-Hao Qiu , Zhishuai Guo , Lijun Zhang , Tianbao Yang

Multilevel optimization has gained renewed interest in machine learning due to its promise in applications such as hyperparameter tuning and continual learning. However, existing methods struggle with the inherent difficulty of efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yuntian Gu , Xuzheng Chen