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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

Simple bilevel problems are optimization problems in which we want to find an optimal solution to an inner problem that minimizes an outer objective function. Such problems appear in many machine learning and signal processing applications…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-21 Lior Doron , Shimrit Shtern

In this paper, we study a class of bilevel optimization program (BP), where the feasible set of the lower level program is independent of the upper level variable. For bilevel programs it is known that the first order approach requires the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Kuang Bai , Wei Yao , Jane J. Ye , Jin Zhang

Bilevel optimization problems, which are problems where two optimization problems are nested, have more and more applications in machine learning. In many practical cases, the upper and the lower objectives correspond to empirical risk…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-03 Mathieu Dagréou , Thomas Moreau , Samuel Vaiter , Pierre Ablin

We establish new lower-bounds for the information complexity of mixed-integer convex optimization under two "bit-wise" oracles. The first oracle provides bits of first-order information in the standard coordinate model, and the second…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-05 Amitabh Basu , Phillip Kerger , Marco Molinaro

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-06 Zhongruo Wang , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma , Meisam Razaviyayn

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

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

Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…

We study the oracle complexity of finding $\varepsilon$-Pareto stationary points in smooth multiobjective optimization with $m$ objectives. Progress is measured by the Pareto stationarity gap $\mathcal{G}(x)$, the norm of the best convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Phillipe R. Sampaio

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 investigate the information complexity of mixed-integer convex optimization under different types of oracles. We establish new lower bounds for the standard first-order oracle, improving upon the previous best known lower bound. This…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-23 Amitabh Basu , Hongyi Jiang , Phillip Kerger , Marco Molinaro

Many recent studies on first-order methods (FOMs) focus on \emph{composite non-convex non-smooth} optimization with linear and/or nonlinear function constraints. Upper (or worst-case) complexity bounds have been established for these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-14 Wei Liu , Qihang Lin , Yangyang Xu

We present a method for solving general nonconvex-strongly-convex bilevel optimization problems. Our method -- the \emph{Restarted Accelerated HyperGradient Descent} (\texttt{RAHGD}) method -- finds an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-04 Haikuo Yang , Luo Luo , Chris Junchi Li , Michael I. Jordan

In this work, we study nonconvex-strongly convex online bilevel optimization (OBO) using only first-order oracle. Existing OBO algorithms are mainly based on hypergradient descent, which requires access to a Hessian-vector product (HVP)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Tingkai Jia , Cheng Chen

Relative to the large literature on upper bounds on complexity of convex optimization, lesser attention has been paid to the fundamental hardness of these problems. Given the extensive use of convex optimization in machine learning and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-11-22 Alekh Agarwal , Peter L. Bartlett , Pradeep Ravikumar , Martin J. Wainwright

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

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

We propose a projection-free conditional gradient-type algorithm for smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions and the constraint set is a closed convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Tesi Xiao , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Saeed Ghadimi

We prove lower bounds for higher-order methods in smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization. Our contribution is threefold: We first show that a deterministic algorithm cannot profit from the finite-sum structure of the objective, and that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-05 Nicolas Emmenegger , Rasmus Kyng , Ahad N. Zehmakan