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Related papers: Non-Stationary Functional Bilevel Optimization

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Solving bilevel optimization (BLO) problems to global optimality is generally intractable. A common surrogate is to compute a hyper-stationary point -- a stationary point of the hyper-objective function obtained by minimizing or maximizing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-30 He Chen , Jiajin Li , Anthony Man-Cho So

Bi-level optimization (BO) has become a fundamental mathematical framework for addressing hierarchical machine learning problems. As deep learning models continue to grow in size, the demand for scalable bi-level optimization solutions has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Qianli Shen , Yezhen Wang , Zhouhao Yang , Xiang Li , Haonan Wang , Yang Zhang , Jonathan Scarlett , Zhanxing Zhu , Kenji Kawaguchi

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

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Xu Shi , Yinglin Du , Rufeng Xiao , Rujun Jiang

This paper considers the smooth bilevel optimization in which the lower-level problem is strongly convex and the upper-level problem is possibly nonconvex. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access the unbiased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

Bilevel optimization has garnered significant attention in the machine learning community recently, particularly regarding the development of efficient numerical methods. While substantial progress has been made in developing efficient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-04 Qichao Cao , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang

In this paper, we focus on the nonconvex-nonconvex bilevel optimization problem (BLO), where both upper-level and lower-level objectives are nonconvex, with the upper-level problem potentially being nonsmooth. We develop a two-timescale…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Nachuan Xiao , Xiaoyin Hu , Xin Liu , Kim-Chuan Toh

Federated bilevel optimization has received increasing attention in various emerging machine learning and communication applications. Recently, several Hessian-vector-based algorithms have been proposed to solve the federated bilevel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Minhui Huang , Dewei Zhang , Kaiyi Ji

Bilevel optimization (BO) is widely applicable to many machine learning problems. Scaling BO, however, requires repeatedly computing hypergradients, which involves solving inverse Hessian-vector products (IHVPs). In practice, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Disen Liao , Felix Dangel , Yaoliang Yu

Bilevel optimization plays an essential role in many machine learning tasks, ranging from hyperparameter optimization to meta-learning. Existing studies on bilevel optimization, however, focus on either centralized or synchronous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Yang Jiao , Kai Yang , Tiancheng Wu , Dongjin Song , Chengtao Jian

Bilevel optimization is a popular two-level hierarchical optimization, which has been widely applied to many machine learning tasks such as hyperparameter learning, meta learning and continual learning. Although many bilevel optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-21 Feihu Huang

This work presents the first projection-free algorithm to solve stochastic bi-level optimization problems, where the objective function depends on the solution of another stochastic optimization problem. The proposed $\textbf{S}$tochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-08 Zeeshan Akhtar , Amrit Singh Bedi , Srujan Teja Thomdapu , Ketan Rajawat

(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

Many challenges in science and engineering, such as drug discovery and communication network design, involve optimizing complex and expensive black-box functions across vast search spaces. Thus, it is essential to leverage existing data to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Juncheng Dong , Zihao Wu , Hamid Jafarkhani , Ali Pezeshki , Vahid Tarokh

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

The authors' paper in Optimization 63 (2014), 505-533, see Ref. [5], was the first one to provide detailed optimality conditions for pessimistic bilevel optimization. The results there were based on the concept of the two-level optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-12-06 Stephan Dempe , Boris S. Mordukhovich , Alain B. Zemkoho

A novel multiscale consensus-based optimization (CBO) algorithm for solving bi- and tri-level optimization problems is introduced. Existing CBO techniques are generalized by the proposed method through the employment of multiple interacting…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-23 Michael Herty , Yuyang Huang , Dante Kalise , Hicham Kouhkouh

In this paper, we introduce a new functional point of view on bilevel optimization problems for machine learning, where the inner objective is minimized over a function space. These types of problems are most often solved by using methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-10 Ieva Petrulionyte , Julien Mairal , Michael Arbel

Decentralized stochastic bilevel optimization (DSBO) is a powerful tool for various machine learning tasks, including decentralized meta-learning and hyperparameter tuning. Existing DSBO methods primarily address problems with strongly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Yaoshuai Ma , Xiao Wang , Wei Yao , Jin Zhang

Multi-Objective Bi-Level Optimization (MOBLO) addresses nested multi-objective optimization problems common in a range of applications. However, its multi-objective and hierarchical bilevel nature makes it notably complex. Gradient-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-11 Xinmin Yang , Wei Yao , Haian Yin , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang