Related papers: Towards Gradient-based Bilevel Optimization with N…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities via Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but their token-level generation encourages local decisions and lacks global planning, often leading to redundant or inaccurate reasoning.…

Legged robotic systems can play an important role in real-world applications due to their superior load-bearing capabilities, enhanced autonomy, and effective navigation on uneven terrain. They offer an optimal trade-off between mobility…

The paper proposes and justifies a new algorithm of the proximal Newton type to solve a broad class of nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems without strong convexity assumptions. Based on advanced notions and techniques of…

Implicit generative models are difficult to train as no explicit density functions are defined. Generative adversarial nets (GANs) present a minimax framework to train such models, which however can suffer from mode collapse due to the…

A new topology optimization method called the Proportional Topology Optimization (PTO) is presented. As a non-gradient method, PTO is simple to understand, easy to implement, and is also efficient and accurate at the same time. It is…

First-order algorithms have been popular for solving convex and non-convex optimization problems. A key assumption for the majority of these algorithms is that the gradient of the objective function is globally Lipschitz continuous, but…

Integrated learning and optimization (ILO) is a framework in contextual optimization which aims to train a predictive model for the probability distribution of the underlying problem data uncertainty, with the goal of enhancing the quality…

Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…

Matrix Factorization is a popular non-convex optimization problem, for which alternating minimization schemes are mostly used. They usually suffer from the major drawback that the solution is biased towards one of the optimization…

In this paper, we consider non-convex stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) problems that have many applications in machine learning. Although numerous studies have proposed stochastic algorithms for solving these problems, they are limited…

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…

A bi-level optimization framework (BiOPT) was proposed in [3] for convex composite optimization, which is a generalization of bi-level unconstrained minimization framework (BLUM) given in [20]. In this continuation paper, we introduce a…

We propose an inexact decentralized dual gradient tracking method (iDDGT) for decentralized optimization problems with a globally coupled equality constraint. Unlike existing algorithms that rely on either the exact dual gradient or an…

In this paper, we are interested in finding the global minimizer of a nonsmooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization problem. By combining the discrete consensus-based optimization (CBO) algorithm and the gradient descent method, we develop…

Adversarial training (AT) is a widely recognized defense mechanism to gain the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks. It is built on min-max optimization (MMO), where the minimizer (i.e., defender) seeks a robust…

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…

Bilevel optimization has arisen as a powerful tool for many machine learning problems such as meta-learning, hyperparameter optimization, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we investigate the nonconvex-strongly-convex bilevel…

Bilevel optimization reveals the inner structure of otherwise oblique optimization problems, such as hyperparameter tuning, neural architecture search, and meta-learning. A common goal in bilevel optimization is to minimize a…

A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…

We develop a new variational approach on level sets aiming towards convergence rate analysis of a variable Bregman proximal gradient (VBPG) method for a broad class of nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problems. With this new approach,…