Related papers: ZOBA: An Efficient Single-loop Zeroth-order Bileve…
Bilevel optimization is a field of significant theoretical and practical interest, yet solving such optimization problems remains challenging. Evolutionary methods have been employed to address these problems in the black-box setting;…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with zeroth-order (ZO) optimization reduces memory by approximating gradients through function evaluations. However, existing methods essentially perform updates in a one-dimensional space, and…
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…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has gained attention as a memory-efficient alternative to first-order (FO) methods, particularly in settings where gradient computation is expensive or even impractical. Beyond its memory efficiency, in this…
Finding the optimal hyperparameters of a model can be cast as a bilevel optimization problem, typically solved using zero-order techniques. In this work we study first-order methods when the inner optimization problem is convex but…
Collaborative learning is an important tool to train multiple clients more effectively by enabling communication among clients. Identifying helpful clients, however, presents challenging and often introduces significant overhead. In this…
Variance reduction techniques are designed to decrease the sampling variance, thereby accelerating convergence rates of first-order (FO) and zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods. However, in composite optimization problems, ZO methods…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional gradient-based methods due to its reduced memory footprint requirement. However, existing ZO methods suffer…
Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex…
Two-level stochastic optimization formulations have become instrumental in a number of machine learning contexts such as continual learning, neural architecture search, adversarial learning, and hyperparameter tuning. Practical stochastic…
In this paper, we introduce a \textit{Bi-level OPTimization} (BiOPT) framework for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, where both can be nonsmooth. The BiOPT framework involves two levels of methodologies. At the upper level of…
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…
Bayesian optimization is a powerful method for optimizing black-box functions with limited function evaluations. Recent works have shown that optimization in a latent space through deep generative models such as variational autoencoders…
When the available information is noisy zeroth-order (ZO) oracle, stochastic approximation methods are popular for estimating the root of the multivariate gradient equation. Inspired by the Stein's identity, this work establishes a novel…
Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks, but their fine-tuning demands significant memory, posing challenges for resource-constrained environments. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a…
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces memory costs when adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream applications. However, traditional first-order (FO) fine-tuning algorithms incur substantial memory overhead…
A bilevel optimization problem consists of two optimization problems nested as an upper- and a lower-level problem, in which the optimality of the lower-level problem defines a constraint for the upper-level problem. This paper considers…
Bilevel optimization has shown its utility across various machine learning settings, yet most algorithms in practice require second-order information, making it challenging to scale them up. Only recently, a paradigm of first-order…
Bilevel optimization is a powerful tool for many machine learning problems, such as hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. Estimating hypergradients (also known as implicit gradients) is crucial for developing gradient-based methods…
Zeroth-order (ZO) methods are widely used when gradients are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, including black-box learning and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large models, yet their optimization dynamics in deep learning remain…