Related papers: Contextual Stochastic Bilevel Optimization
Stochastic optimization in learning and inference often relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to approximate gradients when exact computation is intractable. However, finite-time MCMC estimators are biased, and reducing this bias…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is well known to be sample-efficient for solving black-box problems. However, the BO algorithms can sometimes get stuck in suboptimal solutions even with plenty of samples. Intrinsically, such suboptimal problem…
The goal of coreset selection in supervised learning is to produce a weighted subset of data, so that training only on the subset achieves similar performance as training on the entire dataset. Existing methods achieved promising results in…
Bi-level optimization, especially the gradient-based category, has been widely used in the deep learning community including hyperparameter optimization and meta-knowledge extraction. Bi-level optimization embeds one problem within another…
Machine learning algorithms in high-dimensional settings are highly susceptible to the influence of even a small fraction of structured outliers, making robust optimization techniques essential. In particular, within the…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
This paper firstly proposes a convex bilevel optimization paradigm to formulate and optimize popular learning and vision problems in real-world scenarios. Different from conventional approaches, which directly design their iteration schemes…
Bayesian optimization is a sample-efficient method for solving expensive, black-box optimization problems. Stochastic programming concerns optimization under uncertainty where, typically, average performance is the quantity of interest. In…
Contextual Bayesian optimization (CBO) is a powerful framework for sequential decision-making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in wind energy systems. In this setting, the learner receives context (e.g., weather…
The paper studies a large-scale order fulfillment problem for a leading e-commerce company in the United States. The challenge involves selecting fulfillment centers and shipping carriers with observational data only to efficiently process…
Dynamic environments pose great challenges for expensive optimization problems, as the objective functions of these problems change over time and thus require remarkable computational resources to track the optimal solutions. Although…
Two-time-scale optimization is a framework introduced in Zeng et al. (2024) that abstracts a range of policy evaluation and policy optimization problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Akin to bi-level optimization under a particular type…
Bilevel optimization problems consist of minimizing a value function whose evaluation depends on the solution of an inner optimization problem. These problems are typically tackled using first-order methods that require computing the…
Existing decentralized stochastic optimization methods assume the lower-level loss function is strongly convex and the stochastic gradient noise has finite variance. These strong assumptions typically are not satisfied in real-world machine…
Solving a bilevel optimization problem is at the core of several machine learning problems such as hyperparameter tuning, data denoising, meta- and few-shot learning, and training-data poisoning. Different from simultaneous or…
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities. However, further enhancing existing MLLMs necessitates high-quality vision-language datasets with carefully curated task complexities,…
Adaptive moment methods have been remarkably successful in deep learning optimization, particularly in the presence of noisy and/or sparse gradients. We further the advantages of adaptive moment techniques by proposing a family of double…
We present SEBOOST, a technique for boosting the performance of existing stochastic optimization methods. SEBOOST applies a secondary optimization process in the subspace spanned by the last steps and descent directions. The method was…
We propose a gradient-free deep reinforcement learning algorithm to solve high-dimensional, finite-horizon stochastic control problems. Although the recently developed deep reinforcement learning framework has achieved great success in…
Stochastic gradient methods are scalable for solving large-scale optimization problems that involve empirical expectations of loss functions. Existing results mainly apply to optimization problems where the objectives are one- or two-level…