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Related papers: Bilevel Optimization with a Lower-level Contractio…

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Bilevel optimization is a hierarchical framework where an upper-level optimization problem is constrained by a lower-level problem, commonly used in machine learning applications such as hyperparameter optimization. Existing bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Yuman Wu , Xiaochuan Gong , Jie Hao , Mingrui Liu

We study a class of algorithms for solving bilevel optimization problems in both stochastic and deterministic settings when the inner-level objective is strongly convex. Specifically, we consider algorithms based on inexact implicit…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-12 Michael Arbel , Julien Mairal

In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Prashant Khanduri , Ioannis Tsaknakis , Yihua Zhang , Sijia Liu , Mingyi Hong

This paper studies simple bilevel problems, where a convex upper-level function is minimized over the optimal solutions of a convex lower-level problem. We first show the fundamental difficulty of simple bilevel problems, that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-28 Huaqing Zhang , Lesi Chen , Jing Xu , Jingzhao Zhang

This paper studies the complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point for stochastic bilevel optimization when the upper-level problem is nonconvex and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent work proposed the first-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Lesi Chen , Junru Li , El Mahdi Chayti , Jingzhao Zhang

We consider simple bilevel optimization problems where the goal is to compute among the optimal solutions of a composite convex optimization problem, one that minimizes a secondary objective function. Our main contribution is threefold. (i)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-14 Sepideh Samadi , Daniel Burbano , Farzad Yousefian

We introduce a framework based on bilevel programming that unifies gradient-based hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. We show that an approximate version of the bilevel problem can be solved by taking into explicit account the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-04 Luca Franceschi , Paolo Frasconi , Saverio Salzo , Riccardo Grazzi , Massimilano Pontil

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-15 Zhishuai Guo , Quanqi Hu , Lijun Zhang , Tianbao Yang

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

Bilevel optimization has been developed for many machine learning tasks with large-scale and high-dimensional data. This paper considers a constrained bilevel optimization problem, where the lower-level optimization problem is convex with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

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

We propose a novel warmstarting method for primal-dual interior point methods based on a smoothing operator that generates a starting point on the central path from the previous optimum. Compared to traditional approaches that prioritize…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Yuwen Chen , Paul Goulart , Colin Jones

Low-rank and nonsmooth matrix optimization problems capture many fundamental tasks in statistics and machine learning. While significant progress has been made in recent years in developing efficient methods for \textit{smooth} low-rank…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Dan Garber , Atara Kaplan

Bilevel optimization recently has attracted increased interest in machine learning due to its many applications such as hyper-parameter optimization and meta learning. Although many bilevel methods recently have been proposed, these methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-21 Feihu Huang , Junyi Li , Shangqian Gao

We address the challenge of efficiently solving parameterized sequences of convex Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problems through warm-starting techniques. We focus on an outer approximation (OA) approach, for which we develop…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-01 Erik Tamm , Gabriele Eichfelder , Jan Kronqvist

This paper considers the smooth bilevel optimization in which the lower-level problem is strongly convex and the upper-level problem is possibly nonconvex. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access the unbiased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

This paper studies the problem of stochastic bilevel optimization where the upper-level function is nonconvex with potentially unbounded smoothness and the lower-level function is strongly convex. This problem is motivated by meta-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Xiaochuan Gong , Jie Hao , Mingrui Liu

We propose a new approach to solving bilevel optimization problems, intermediate between solving full-system optimality conditions with a Newton-type approach, and treating the inner problem as an implicit function. The overall idea is to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-08 Ensio Suonperä , Tuomo Valkonen

In this paper, we study the problem of solving a simple bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective is minimized over the solution set of the lower-level problem. We focus on the general setting in which both the upper-…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-01 Jincheng Cao , Ruichen Jiang , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Aryan Mokhtari

Bilevel reinforcement learning (BRL) has emerged as a powerful framework for aligning generative models, yet its theoretical foundations, especially sample complexity bounds, remain underexplored. In this work, we present the first sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Mudit Gaur , Utsav Singh , Amrit Singh Bedi , Raghu Pasupathu , Vaneet Aggarwal