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This work provides the first finite-time convergence guarantees for linearly constrained stochastic bilevel optimization using only first-order methods, requiring solely gradient information without any Hessian computations or second-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-18 Cac Phan , Kai Wang

Bilevel optimization, addressing challenges in hierarchical learning tasks, has gained significant interest in machine learning. The practical implementation of the gradient descent method to bilevel optimization encounters computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Sheng Fang , Yong-Jin Liu , Wei Yao , Chengming Yu , Jin Zhang

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-03-20 Lin Xiao , Tong Zhang

Several important problem settings within the literature of reinforcement learning (RL), such as meta-learning, hierarchical learning, and RL from human feedback (RL-HF), can be modelled as bilevel RL problems. A lot has been achieved in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Naman Saxena , Vaneet Aggarwal

Bilevel optimization is a central tool in machine learning for high-dimensional hyperparameter tuning. Its applications are vast; for instance, in imaging it can be used for learning data-adaptive regularizers and optimizing forward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Mohammad Sadegh Salehi , Subhadip Mukherjee , Lindon Roberts , Matthias J. Ehrhardt

Bilevel optimization is a fundamental tool in hierarchical decision-making and has been widely applied to machine learning tasks such as hyperparameter tuning, meta-learning, and continual learning. While significant progress has been made…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-25 Nazanin Abolfazli , Sina Sharifi , Mahyar Fazlyab , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani

In this paper we consider convex optimization problems with stochastic composite objective function subject to (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. The objective function is expressed in terms of expectation operator over a sum…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-03 Ion Necoara , Nitesh Kumar Singh

Two-time-scale optimization is a framework introduced in Zeng et al. (2024) that abstracts a range of policy evaluation and policy optimization problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Akin to bi-level optimization under a particular type…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan

Interest in bilevel optimization has grown in recent years, partially due to its applications to tackle challenging machine-learning problems. Several exciting recent works have been centered around developing efficient gradient-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Liuyuan Jiang , Quan Xiao , Victor M. Tenorio , Fernando Real-Rojas , Antonio G. Marques , Tianyi Chen

In this paper, we study the Multi-Objective Bi-Level Optimization (MOBLO) problem, where the upper-level subproblem is a multi-objective optimization problem and the lower-level subproblem is for scalar optimization. Existing gradient-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Feiyang Ye , Baijiong Lin , Xiaofeng Cao , Yu Zhang , Ivor Tsang

Bilevel optimizaiton serves as a powerful tool for many machine learning applications. Perturbed pessimistic bilevel problem PBP$\epsilon$, with $\epsilon$ being an arbitrary positive number, is a variant of the bilevel problem to deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Haimei Huo , Risheng Liu , Zhixun Su

Bilevel optimization, the problem of minimizing a value function which involves the arg-minimum of another function, appears in many areas of machine learning. In a large scale empirical risk minimization setting where the number of samples…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-03 Mathieu Dagréou , Pierre Ablin , Samuel Vaiter , Thomas Moreau

We design Local LMO - a new projection-free gradient-type method for constrained optimization. The key algorithmic idea is to replace the global linear minimization oracle over the constraint set used by Frank-Wolfe (FW) with a local linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Peter Richtárik , Kaja Gruntkowska , Hanmin Li

Non-convex sparse minimization (NSM), or $\ell_0$-constrained minimization of convex loss functions, is an important optimization problem that has many machine learning applications. NSM is generally NP-hard, and so to exactly solve NSM is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-10-04 Shinsaku Sakaue , Naoki Marumo

Bilevel optimization has been recently used in many machine learning problems such as hyperparameter optimization, policy optimization, and meta learning. Although many bilevel optimization methods have been proposed, they still suffer from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-27 Feihu Huang , Junyi Li , Shangqian Gao , Heng Huang

Bilevel learning has gained prominence in machine learning, inverse problems, and imaging applications, including hyperparameter optimization, learning data-adaptive regularizers, and optimizing forward operators. The large-scale nature of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-20 Mohammad Sadegh Salehi , Subhadip Mukherjee , Lindon Roberts , Matthias J. Ehrhardt

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

We propose efficient methods for solving stochastic simple bilevel optimization problems with convex inner levels, where the goal is to minimize an outer stochastic objective function subject to the solution set of an inner stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-25 Khanh-Hung Giang-Tran , Soroosh Shafiee , Nam Ho-Nguyen

Bilevel optimization is characterized by a two-level optimization structure, where the upper-level problem is constrained by optimal lower-level solutions, and such structures are prevalent in real-world problems. The constraint by optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Ruth Wan Theng Chew , Quoc Phong Nguyen , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Many problems in machine learning involve bilevel optimization (BLO), including hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning, and dataset distillation. Bilevel problems consist of two nested sub-problems, called the outer and inner problems,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Paul Vicol , Jonathan Lorraine , Fabian Pedregosa , David Duvenaud , Roger Grosse