English
Related papers

Related papers: On Finding Small Hyper-Gradients in Bilevel Optimi…

200 papers

Hierarchical optimization refers to problems with interdependent decision variables and objectives, such as minimax and bilevel formulations. While various algorithms have been proposed, existing methods and analyses lack adaptivity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xiaochuan Gong , Jie Hao , Mingrui Liu

We provide new gradient-based methods for efficiently solving a broad class of ill-conditioned optimization problems. We consider the problem of minimizing a function $f : \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ which is implicitly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-08 Jonathan Kelner , Annie Marsden , Vatsal Sharan , Aaron Sidford , Gregory Valiant , Honglin Yuan

Multilevel optimization has gained renewed interest in machine learning due to its promise in applications such as hyperparameter tuning and continual learning. However, existing methods struggle with the inherent difficulty of efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yuntian Gu , Xuzheng Chen

This paper presents new first-order methods for achieving optimal oracle complexities in convex optimization with convex functional constraints. Oracle complexities are measured by the number of function and gradient evaluations. To achieve…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Qi Deng , Guanghui Lan , Zhenwei Lin

Single-objective bilevel optimization is a specialized form of constraint optimization problems where one of the constraints is an optimization problem itself. These problems are typically non-convex and strongly NP-Hard. Recently, there…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Anuraganand Sharma

Bilevel optimization is a popular hierarchical model in machine learning, and has been widely applied to many machine learning tasks such as meta learning, hyperparameter learning and policy optimization. Although many bilevel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Feihu Huang

We consider bilevel optimization problems with general nonconvex lower-level objectives and show that the classical hyperfunction-based formulation is unsettled, since the global minimizer of the lower-level problem is generally…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Xiaotian Jiang , Jiaxiang Li , Jiawen Bi , Mingyi Hong , Shuzhong Zhang

Existing methods for nonconvex bilevel optimization (NBO) require prior knowledge of first- and second-order problem-specific parameters (e.g., Lipschitz constants and the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (P{\L}) parameters) to set step sizes, a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Xu Shi , Yinglin Du , Rufeng Xiao , Rujun Jiang

It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-28 Guy Kornowski , Ohad Shamir

Decentralized minimax optimization has been actively studied in the past few years due to its application in a wide range of machine learning models. However, the current theoretical understanding of its convergence rate is far from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Yihan Zhang , Wenhao Jiang , Feng Zheng , Chiu C. Tan , Xinghua Shi , Hongchang Gao

Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Constantinos Daskalakis , Stratis Skoulakis , Manolis Zampetakis

We study Frank-Wolfe (FW) methods for constrained bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is solved only approximately, yielding biased and inexact hypergradients. We analyze inexact variants of vanilla FW as well as away-step and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Anthony Palmieri , Francesco Rinaldi , Saverio Salzo , Sara Venturini

A wide range of applications arising in machine learning and signal processing can be cast as convex optimization problems. These problems are often ill-posed, i.e., the optimal solution lacks a desired property such as uniqueness or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-18 Mostafa Amini , Farzad Yousefian

Inspired by multigrid methods for linear systems of equations, multilevel optimization methods have been proposed to solve structured optimization problems. Multilevel methods make more assumptions regarding the structure of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-27 Chin Pang Ho , Michal Kocvara , Panos Parpas

In this paper, we focus on the nonconvex-nonconvex bilevel optimization problem (BLO), where both upper-level and lower-level objectives are nonconvex, with the upper-level problem potentially being nonsmooth. We develop a two-timescale…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Nachuan Xiao , Xiaoyin Hu , Xin Liu , Kim-Chuan Toh

We first show a simple but striking result in bilevel optimization: unconstrained $C^\infty$ smooth bilevel programming is as hard as general extended-real-valued lower semicontinuous minimization. We then proceed to a worst-case analysis…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Jérôme Bolte , Quoc-Tung Le , Edouard Pauwels , Samuel Vaiter

Although application examples of multilevel optimization have already been discussed since the 1990s, the development of solution methods was almost limited to bilevel cases due to the difficulty of the problem. In recent years, in machine…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-27 Ryo Sato , Mirai Tanaka , Akiko Takeda

Inverse problems are key issues in several scientific areas, including signal processing and medical imaging. Data-driven approaches for inverse problems aim for learning model and regularization parameters from observed data samples, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-28 Mathias Staudigl , Simon Weissmann , Tristan van Leeuwen

We consider stochastic unconstrained bilevel optimization problems when only the first-order gradient oracles are available. While numerous optimization methods have been proposed for tackling bilevel problems, existing methods either tend…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-27 Jeongyeol Kwon , Dohyun Kwon , Stephen Wright , Robert Nowak

The use of min-max optimization in adversarial training of deep neural network classifiers and training of generative adversarial networks has motivated the study of nonconvex-nonconcave optimization objectives, which frequently arise in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-02 Jelena Diakonikolas , Constantinos Daskalakis , Michael I. Jordan