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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

Bi-level optimization (BO) has become a fundamental mathematical framework for addressing hierarchical machine learning problems. As deep learning models continue to grow in size, the demand for scalable bi-level optimization solutions has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Qianli Shen , Yezhen Wang , Zhouhao Yang , Xiang Li , Haonan Wang , Yang Zhang , Jonathan Scarlett , Zhanxing Zhu , Kenji Kawaguchi

We study a general class of bilevel problems, consisting in the minimization of an upper-level objective which depends on the solution to a parametric fixed-point equation. Important instances arising in machine learning include…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-13 Riccardo Grazzi , Luca Franceschi , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo

Bilevel optimization (BLO) becomes fundamentally more challenging when the lower-level objective admits multiple minimizers. Beyond the unique-minimizer setting, two difficulties arise: (1) evaluating the hyper-objective $F_{\max}$ requires…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-16 Saeed Masiha , Zebang Shen , Negar Kiyavash , Niao He

The goal of this tutorial is to introduce key models, algorithms, and open questions related to the use of optimization methods for solving problems arising in machine learning. It is written with an INFORMS audience in mind, specifically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-03 Frank E. Curtis , Katya Scheinberg

Both bilevel and robust optimization are established fields of mathematical optimization and operations research. However, only until recently, the similarities in their mathematical structure has neither been studied theoretically nor…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-20 Henri Lefebvre , Martin Schmidt , Simon Stevens , Johannes Thürauf

Setting regularization parameters for Lasso-type estimators is notoriously difficult, though crucial in practice. The most popular hyperparameter optimization approach is grid-search using held-out validation data. Grid-search however…

Bilevel optimization, with broad applications in machine learning, has an intricate hierarchical structure. Gradient-based methods have emerged as a common approach to large-scale bilevel problems. However, the computation of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-27 Yan Yang , Bin Gao , Ya-xiang Yuan

The acquisition of explicit user feedback (e.g., ratings) in real-world recommender systems is often hindered by the need for active user involvement. To mitigate this issue, implicit feedback (e.g., clicks) generated during user browsing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Zongwei Wang , Min Gao , Wentao Li , Junliang Yu , Linxin Guo , Hongzhi Yin

We propose techniques for approximating bilevel optimization problems with non-smooth lower level problems that can have a non-unique solution. To this end, we substitute the expression of a minimizer of the lower level minimization problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-04-27 Peter Ochs , René Ranftl , Thomas Brox , Thomas Pock

The deployment constraints in practical applications necessitate the pruning of large-scale deep learning models, i.e., promoting their weight sparsity. As illustrated by the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), pruning also has the potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Yihua Zhang , Yuguang Yao , Parikshit Ram , Pu Zhao , Tianlong Chen , Mingyi Hong , Yanzhi Wang , Sijia Liu

A common strategy in modern learning systems is to learn a representation that is useful for many tasks, a.k.a. representation learning. We study this strategy in the imitation learning setting for Markov decision processes (MDPs) where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Sanjeev Arora , Simon S. Du , Sham Kakade , Yuping Luo , Nikunj Saunshi

Bilevel optimization, a well-established field for modeling hierarchical decision-making problems, has recently intersected with sustainability studies and practices, resulting in a series of works focusing on bilevel optimization problems…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Giulia Caselli , Manuel Iori , Ivana Ljubić

Bilevel programs are optimization problems where some variables are solutions to optimization problems themselves, and they arise in a variety of control applications, including: control of vehicle traffic networks, inverse reinforcement…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-09-27 Aurélien Ouattara , Anil Aswani

Bilevel optimization and bilevel minimax optimization have recently emerged as unifying frameworks for a range of machine-learning tasks, including hyperparameter optimization and reinforcement learning. The existing literature focuses on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Xuelin Zhang , Peipei Yuan

Gradient-based Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) methods have been widely applied to handle modern learning tasks. However, most existing strategies are theoretically designed based on restrictive assumptions (e.g., convexity of the lower-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Risheng Liu , Xuan Liu , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang , Yixuan Zhang

Bi-level optimization has achieved considerable success in contemporary machine learning applications, especially for given proper hyperparameters. However, due to the two-level optimization structure, commonly, researchers focus on two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Congliang Chen , Li Shen , Zhiqiang Xu , Wei Liu , Zhi-Quan Luo , Peilin Zhao

Bilevel linear programming (LP) is one of the simplest classes of bilevel optimization problems, yet it is known to be NP-hard in general. Specifically, determining whether the optimal objective value of a bilevel LP is at least as good as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-23 Nagisa Sugishita , Margarida Carvalho

Multi-Objective Bi-Level Optimization (MOBLO) addresses nested multi-objective optimization problems common in a range of applications. However, its multi-objective and hierarchical bilevel nature makes it notably complex. Gradient-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-11 Xinmin Yang , Wei Yao , Haian Yin , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang

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