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We study a class of bilevel optimization problems in which both the upper- and lower-level problems have minimax structures. This setting captures a broad range of emerging applications. Despite the extensive literature on bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Yiyang Shen , Yutian He , Weiran Wang , Qihang Lin

We investigate the complexity of bilevel combinatorial optimization with uncertainty in the follower's objective, in a robust optimization approach. We show that the robust counterpart of the bilevel problem under interval uncertainty can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-05 Christoph Buchheim , Dorothee Henke , Felix Hommelsheim

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yuping Luo , Huazhe Xu , Yuanzhi Li , Yuandong Tian , Trevor Darrell , Tengyu Ma

While reinforcement learning (RL) methods that learn an internal model of the environment have the potential to be more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts, learning to model raw observations from high dimensional sensors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Raj Ghugare , Homanga Bharadhwaj , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Bilevel optimization is a fundamental tool in hierarchical decision-making and has been widely applied to machine learning tasks such as hyperparameter tuning, meta-learning, and continual learning. While significant progress has been made…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-25 Nazanin Abolfazli , Sina Sharifi , Mahyar Fazlyab , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani

Reinforcement learning is widely used in applications where one needs to perform sequential decisions while interacting with the environment. The problem becomes more challenging when the decision requirement includes satisfying some safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Qinbo Bai , Amrit Singh Bedi , Mridul Agarwal , Alec Koppel , Vaneet Aggarwal

In this paper, we revisit the bilevel optimization problem, in which the upper-level objective function is generally nonconvex and the lower-level objective function is strongly convex. Although this type of problem has been studied…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Yifan Yang , Peiyao Xiao , Kaiyi Ji

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed to optimize problem-solving by learning actions that maximize rewards, a task that becomes particularly challenging in random and nonstationary environments. Even advanced RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Sebastian Zieglmeier , Niklas Erdmann , Narada D. Warakagoda

Learning to Optimize (LtO) is a problem setting in which a machine learning (ML) model is trained to emulate a constrained optimization solver. Learning to produce optimal and feasible solutions subject to complex constraints is a difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 James Kotary , Ferdinando Fioretto

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar

Bilevel optimization with traffic equilibrium constraints plays an important role in transportation planning and management problems such as traffic control, transport network design, and congestion pricing. In this paper, we consider a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-27 Akshit Goyal , Andrew Lamperski

We study Frank-Wolfe (FW) methods for constrained bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is solved only approximately, yielding biased and inexact hypergradients. We analyze inexact variants of vanilla FW as well as away-step and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Anthony Palmieri , Francesco Rinaldi , Saverio Salzo , Sara Venturini

Heuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing, Concorde, and METIS are effective and widely used approaches to find solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. However, they are limited by the high sample complexity required to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Qingpeng Cai , Will Hang , Azalia Mirhoseini , George Tucker , Jingtao Wang , Wei Wei

Bilevel optimization (BO) is useful for solving a variety of important machine learning problems including but not limited to hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning, continual learning, and reinforcement learning. Conventional BO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Mao Ye , Bo Liu , Stephen Wright , Peter Stone , Qiang Liu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-08 Tommaso Giovannelli , Griffin Dean Kent , Luis Nunes Vicente

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

We consider a distributionally robust stochastic optimization problem and formulate it as a stochastic two-level composition optimization problem with the use of the mean--semideviation risk measure. In this setting, we consider a single…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-12 Landi Zhu , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Andrzej Ruszczyński

Using machine learning to solve combinatorial optimization (CO) problems is challenging, especially when the data is unlabeled. This work proposes an unsupervised learning framework for CO problems. Our framework follows a standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Haoyu Wang , Nan Wu , Hang Yang , Cong Hao , Pan Li

We introduce Local Reinforcement-Based Selection of Auxiliary Objectives (LRSAO), a novel approach that selects auxiliary objectives using reinforcement learning (RL) to support the optimization process of an evolutionary algorithm (EA) as…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Abderrahim Bendahi , Adrien Fradin , Matthieu Lerasle

Bilevel optimization, with broad applications in machine learning, has an intricate hierarchical structure. Gradient-based methods have emerged as a common approach to large-scale bilevel problems. However, the computation of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-27 Yan Yang , Bin Gao , Ya-xiang Yuan