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This paper investigates a class of stochastic bilevel optimization problems where the upper-level function is nonconvex with potentially unbounded smoothness and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. These problems have significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Xiaochuan Gong , Jie Hao , Mingrui Liu

Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Kaiyi Ji

This paper considers the simple bilevel optimization (SBO) problem, which minimizes a composite convex function over the optimal solution set of another composite convex minimization problem. We first show that this bilevel problem is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-11 Rujun Jiang , Xu Shi , Weizheng Song , Jiulin Wang

Bilevel optimization is an important class of optimization problems where one optimization problem is nested within another. While various methods have emerged to address unconstrained general bilevel optimization problems, there has been a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-15 Nazanin Abolfazli , Ruichen Jiang , Aryan Mokhtari , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani

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

In this paper, we propose a multilevel stochastic framework for the solution of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach uses random regularized first-order models that exploit an available hierarchical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-27 Filippo Marini , Margherita Porcelli , Elisa Riccietti

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

Bilevel optimization enjoys a wide range of applications in emerging machine learning and signal processing problems such as hyper-parameter optimization, image reconstruction, meta-learning, adversarial training, and reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Han Shen , Quan Xiao , Tianyi Chen

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

In this paper, we focus on simple bilevel optimization problems, where we minimize a convex smooth objective function over the optimal solution set of another convex smooth constrained optimization problem. We present a novel bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-03 Jincheng Cao , Ruichen Jiang , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Aryan Mokhtari

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

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

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 propose a first order algorithm, a modified version of FISTA, to solve an optimization problem with an objective function that is a sum of a possibly nonconvex function, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a convex function which can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-20 Chee-Khian Sim

In this paper, we propose a class of penalty methods with stochastic approximation for solving stochastic nonlinear programming problems. We assume that only noisy gradients or function values of the objective function are available via…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-20 Xiao Wang , Shiqian Ma , Ya-xiang Yuan

In this paper, an inexact proximal-point penalty method is studied for constrained optimization problems, where the objective function is non-convex, and the constraint functions can also be non-convex. The proposed method approximately…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-02 Qihang Lin , Runchao Ma , Yangyang Xu

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

Online bilevel optimization (OBO) is a powerful framework for machine learning problems where both outer and inner objectives evolve over time, requiring dynamic updates. Current OBO approaches rely on deterministic \textit{window-smoothed}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Parvin Nazari , Bojian Hou , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Li Shen , George Michailidis

We study bilevel optimization problems where the lower-level problems are strongly convex and have coupled linear constraints. To overcome the potential non-smoothness of the hyper-objective and the computational challenges associated with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Wei Shen , Jiawei Zhang , Minhui Huang , Cong Shen

Bilevel optimization is an important formulation for many machine learning problems. Current bilevel optimization algorithms assume that the gradient of the upper-level function is Lipschitz. However, recent studies reveal that certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Jie Hao , Xiaochuan Gong , Mingrui Liu