Related papers: Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Con…
This paper studies simple bilevel problems, where a convex upper-level function is minimized over the optimal solutions of a convex lower-level problem. We first show the fundamental difficulty of simple bilevel problems, that the…
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…
Necessary conditions for high-order optimality in smooth nonlinear constrained optimization are explored and their inherent intricacy discussed. A two-phase minimization algorithm is proposed which can achieve approximate first-, second-…
Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…
We provide an explicit construction and direct proof for the lower bound on the number of first order oracle accesses required for a randomized algorithm to minimize a convex Lipschitz function.
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…
Stochastic Bilevel optimization usually involves minimizing an upper-level (UL) function that is dependent on the arg-min of a strongly-convex lower-level (LL) function. Several algorithms utilize Neumann series to approximate certain…
It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…
In this paper, we present several new results on minimizing a nonsmooth and nonconvex function under a Lipschitz condition. Recent work shows that while the classical notion of Clarke stationarity is computationally intractable up to some…
In this paper we study a class of unconstrained and constrained bilevel optimization problems in which the lower level is a possibly nonsmooth convex optimization problem, while the upper level is a possibly nonconvex optimization problem.…
We give nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the oracle complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points ($\| \nabla F(x) \| \leq\epsilon$) in stochastic convex optimization. We jointly analyze the oracle complexity in both the local…
We propose efficient methods for solving stochastic simple bilevel optimization problems with convex inner levels, where the goal is to minimize an outer stochastic objective function subject to the solution set of an inner stochastic…
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…
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-…
Bilevel optimization and bilevel minimax optimization have recently emerged as unifying frameworks for a range of machine-learning tasks, including hyperparameter optimization and reinforcement learning. The existing literature focuses on…
This paper develops negative curvature methods for continuous nonlinear unconstrained optimization in stochastic settings, in which function, gradient, and Hessian information is available only through probabilistic oracles, i.e., oracles…
This paper studies the problem of stochastic bilevel optimization where the upper-level function is nonconvex with potentially unbounded smoothness and the lower-level function is strongly convex. This problem is motivated by meta-learning…
When faced with multiple minima of an "inner-level" convex optimization problem, the convex bilevel optimization problem selects an optimal solution which also minimizes an auxiliary "outer-level" convex objective of interest. Bilevel…
This paper investigates simple bilevel optimization problems where we minimize an upper-level objective over the optimal solution set of a convex lower-level objective. Existing methods for such problems either only guarantee asymptotic…
Bilevel optimization has witnessed a resurgence of interest, driven by its critical role in trustworthy and efficient AI applications. While many recent works have established convergence to stationary points or local minima, obtaining the…