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Optimal control of obstacle problems arises in a wide range of applications and is computationally challenging due to its nonsmoothness, nonlinearity, and bilevel structure. Classical numerical approaches rely on mesh-based discretization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-08 Yongcun Song , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang , Lvgang Zhang

In this paper, we consider nonlinear optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We propose a Trust-Region Stochastic Sequential Quadratic Programming (TR-SSQP) method and establish its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Yuchen Fang , Javad Lavaei , Sen Na

In this paper, we study multi-block min-max bilevel optimization problems, where the upper level is non-convex strongly-concave minimax objective and the lower level is a strongly convex objective, and there are multiple blocks of dual…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-22 Quanqi Hu , Yongjian Zhong , Tianbao Yang

Stochastic smooth nonconvex minimax problems are prevalent in machine learning, e.g., GAN training, fair classification, and distributionally robust learning. Stochastic gradient descent ascent (GDA)-type methods are popular in practice due…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-15 Yassine Laguel , Yasa Syed , Necdet Serhat Aybat , Mert Gürbüzbalaban

Bilevel optimization is a central tool in machine learning for high-dimensional hyperparameter tuning. Its applications are vast; for instance, in imaging it can be used for learning data-adaptive regularizers and optimizing forward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Mohammad Sadegh Salehi , Subhadip Mukherjee , Lindon Roberts , Matthias J. Ehrhardt

This paper consider solving a class of nonconvex-strongly-convex distributed stochastic bilevel optimization (DSBO) problems with personalized inner-level objectives. Most existing algorithms require computational loops for hypergradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Youcheng Niu , Jinming Xu , Ying Sun , Yan Huang , Li Chai

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

We initiate the study of stochastic optimization with oblivious noise, broadly generalizing the standard heavy-tailed noise setup. In our setting, in addition to random observation noise, the stochastic gradient may be subject to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Ilias Diakonikolas , Sushrut Karmalkar , Jongho Park , Christos Tzamos

In this paper, we study the problem of solving a simple bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective is minimized over the solution set of the lower-level problem. We focus on the general setting in which both the upper-…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-01 Jincheng Cao , Ruichen Jiang , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Aryan Mokhtari

In recent years, non-convex optimization problems are more often described by generalized $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness assumption rather than standard one. Meanwhile, severely corrupted data used in these problems has increased the demand for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Nikita Kornilov , Philip Zmushko , Andrei Semenov , Mark Ikonnikov , Alexander Gasnikov , Alexander Beznosikov

We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yossi Arjevani , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Dylan J. Foster , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-22 Eduard Gorbunov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Naoki Sato , Hideaki Iiduka

Stochastic first-order methods such as Stochastic Extragradient (SEG) or Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) for solving smooth minimax problems and, more generally, variational inequality problems (VIP) have been gaining a lot of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-02 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , David Dobre , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov , Gauthier Gidel

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

This paper analyzes a two-timescale stochastic algorithm framework for bilevel optimization. Bilevel optimization is a class of problems which exhibit a two-level structure, and its goal is to minimize an outer objective function with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-09 Mingyi Hong , Hoi-To Wai , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Heavy-tailed noise in nonconvex stochastic optimization has garnered increasing research interest, as empirical studies, including those on training attention models, suggest it is a more realistic gradient noise condition. This paper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Shuhua Yu , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

We develop stochastic first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve a class of convex-concave saddle-point problems. When the saddle function is strongly convex in the primal variable, we develop the first stochastic restart scheme for this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-13 Renbo Zhao

We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Yossi Arjevani , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Dylan J. Foster , Nathan Srebro , Blake Woodworth

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