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Bilevel programming has recently received a great deal of attention due to its abundant applications in many areas. The optimal value function approach provides a useful reformulation of the bilevel problem, but its utility is often limited…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Jan Harold Alcantara , Akiko Takeda

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

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

(Stochastic) bilevel optimization is a frequently encountered problem in machine learning with a wide range of applications such as meta-learning, hyper-parameter optimization, and reinforcement learning. Most of the existing studies on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Meng Ding , Mingxi Lei , Yunwen Lei , Di Wang , Jinhui Xu

This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-17 Vladimir Norkin , Alois Pichler , Anton Kozyriev

This work considers the problem of finding a first-order stationary point of a non-convex function with potentially unbounded smoothness constant using a stochastic gradient oracle. We focus on the class of $(L_0,L_1)$-smooth functions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Matthew Faw , Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

Bilevel optimization problems, encountered in fields such as economics, engineering, and machine learning, pose significant computational challenges due to their hierarchical structure and constraints at both upper and lower levels.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-21 Mengwei Xu , Yu-Hong Dai , Xin-Wei Liu , Bo Wang

Many contemporary applications in signal processing and machine learning give rise to structured non-convex non-smooth optimization problems that can often be tackled by simple iterative methods quite effectively. One of the keys to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-29 Jiajin Li , Anthony Man-Cho So , Wing-Kin Ma

We analyse a general class of bilevel problems, in which the upper-level problem consists in the minimization of a smooth objective function and the lower-level problem is to find the fixed point of a smooth contraction map. This type of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-17 Riccardo Grazzi , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo

This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-12 Dimitris Boskos , Jorge Cortés , Sonia Martínez

We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Ashok Cutkosky , Harsh Mehta , Francesco Orabona

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

Stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) has been integrated into many machine learning paradigms recently, including hyperparameter optimization, meta learning, and reinforcement learning. Along with the wide range of applications, there have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Xuelin Zhang , Hong Chen , Bin Gu , Tieliang Gong , Feng Zheng

This paper introduces a novel double regularization scheme for bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level problem is composite and convex, but not necessarily strongly convex, in the lower-level variable. The analysis focuses on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Mattia Solla , Johannes O. Royset

This paper is devoted to the study of stochastic optimization problems under the generalized smoothness assumption. By considering the unbiased gradient oracle in Stochastic Gradient Descent, we provide strategies to achieve in bounds the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-26 Aleksandr Lobanov , Alexander Gasnikov

We propose a bilevel optimization strategy for selecting the best hyperparameter value for the nonsmooth $\ell_p$ regularizer with $0<p\le 1$. The concerned bilevel optimization problem has a nonsmooth, possibly nonconvex,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-20 Takayuki Okuno , Akiko Takeda , Akihiro Kawana , Motokazu Watanabe

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

Stochastic bilevel optimization generalizes the classic stochastic optimization from the minimization of a single objective to the minimization of an objective function that depends the solution of another optimization problem. Recently,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-01 Tianyi Chen , Yuejiao Sun , Quan Xiao , Wotao Yin

Over the past decades, the concept "partial smoothness" has been playing as a powerful tool in several fields involving nonsmooth analysis, such as nonsmooth optimization, inverse problems and operation research, etc. The essence of partial…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Ziqi Qin , Jingwei Liang

Recently, bi-level optimization (BLO) has taken center stage in some very exciting developments in the area of signal processing (SP) and machine learning (ML). Roughly speaking, BLO is a classical optimization problem that involves two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Yihua Zhang , Prashant Khanduri , Ioannis Tsaknakis , Yuguang Yao , Mingyi Hong , Sijia Liu