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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

We introduce contextual stochastic bilevel optimization (CSBO) -- a stochastic bilevel optimization framework with the lower-level problem minimizing an expectation conditioned on some contextual information and the upper-level decision…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Yifan Hu , Jie Wang , Yao Xie , Andreas Krause , Daniel Kuhn

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is well known that bilevel optimization problems are hard to solve both in theory and practice. In this paper, we highlight a further computational difficulty when it comes to solving bilevel problems with continuous but nonconvex lower…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-04 Yasmine Beck , Daniel Bienstock , Martin Schmidt , Johannes Thürauf

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

Gradient methods have become mainstream techniques for Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) in learning fields. The validity of existing works heavily rely on either a restrictive Lower-Level Strong Convexity (LLSC) condition or on solving a series…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-03 Risheng Liu , Yaohua Liu , Wei Yao , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang

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

Adam has become one of the most popular optimizers for training modern deep neural networks, such as transformers. However, its applicability is largely restricted to single-level optimization problems. In this paper, we aim to extend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Xiaochuan Gong , Jie Hao , Mingrui Liu

Bi-level optimization problems, where one wishes to find the global minimizer of an upper-level objective function over the globally optimal solution set of a lower-level objective, arise in a variety of scenarios throughout science and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-13 Nicolás García Trillos , Sixu Li , Konstantin Riedl , Yuhua Zhu

Bilevel optimization (BO) has recently gained prominence in many machine learning applications due to its ability to capture the nested structure inherent in these problems. Recently, many hypergradient methods have been proposed as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Wanli Shi , Yi Chang , Bin Gu

Bilevel optimization is widely applied in many machine learning tasks such as hyper-parameter learning, meta learning and reinforcement learning. Although many algorithms recently have been developed to solve the bilevel optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-26 Feihu Huang

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

We present in this paper novel accelerated fully first-order methods in \emph{Bilevel Optimization} (BLO). Firstly, for BLO under the assumption that the lower-level functions admit the typical strong convexity assumption, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-10 Chris Junchi Li

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 has gained prominence in various applications. In this study, we introduce a framework for solving bilevel optimization problems, where the variables in both the lower and upper levels are constrained on Riemannian…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-05 Andi Han , Bamdev Mishra , Pratik Jawanpuria , Akiko Takeda