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Penalty-based methods have become popular for solving bilevel optimization (BLO) problems, thanks to their effective first-order nature. However, they often require inner-loop iterations to solve the lower-level (LL) problem and small…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-24 Liuyuan Jiang , Quan Xiao , Lisha Chen , Tianyi Chen

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) with peak constraints, where an agent chooses a policy to optimize an objective and at the same time satisfy additional constraints. The agent has to take…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-09 Ather Gattami

In this paper, we explore a broad class of constrained saddle point problems with a bilevel structure, wherein the upper-level objective function is nonconvex-concave and smooth over compact and convex constraint sets, subject to a strongly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-31 Mohammad Mahdi Ahmadi , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianqi Zheng , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada

Generative models form the backbone of modern machine learning, underpinning state-of-the-art systems in text, vision, and multimodal applications. While Maximum Likelihood Estimation has traditionally served as the dominant training…

We study a class of misspecified saddle point (SP) problems, where the optimization objective depends on an unknown parameter that must be learned concurrently from data. Unlike existing studies that assume parameters are fully known or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Mohammad Mahdi Ahmadi , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani

This paper investigates value function approximation in the context of zero-sum Markov games, which can be viewed as a generalization of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework to the two-agent case. We generalize error bounds from MDPs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-07 Michail Lagoudakis , Ron Parr

Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) extend standard Markov decision processes (MDPs) to account for uncertainty in the transition probabilities. RMDPs have an uncertainty set that defines a set of possible transition functions, each of…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Marnix Suilen , Guillermo A. Pérez

Bilevel optimization, a hierarchical optimization paradigm, has gained significant attention in a wide range of practical applications, notably in the fine-tuning of generative models. However, due to the nested problem structure, most…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-29 Liuyuan Jiang , Quan Xiao , Lisha Chen , Tianyi Chen

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

Bilevel optimization is an important class of optimization problems where one optimization problem is nested within another. While various methods have emerged to address unconstrained general bilevel optimization problems, there has been a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-15 Nazanin Abolfazli , Ruichen Jiang , Aryan Mokhtari , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani

We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-18 Dongsheng Ding , Chen-Yu Wei , Kaiqing Zhang , Alejandro Ribeiro

We study the convergence of Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent in unconstrained bilinear games. In a first part, we consider the zero-sum case and extend previous results by Daskalakis et al. in 2018, Liang and Stokes in 2019, and others:…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-24 Étienne de Montbrun , Jérôme Renault

Bilevel optimization is one of the fundamental problems in machine learning and optimization. Recent theoretical developments in bilevel optimization focus on finding the first-order stationary points for nonconvex-strongly-convex cases. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Minhui Huang , Xuxing Chen , Kaiyi Ji , Shiqian Ma , Lifeng Lai

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.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-08 Zhaosong Lu , Sanyou Mei

This paper introduces a novel Homogeneous Second-order Descent Ascent (HSDA) algorithm for nonconvex-strongly concave minimax optimization problems. At each iteration, HSDA uniquely computes a search direction by solving a homogenized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Jia-Hao Chen , Zi Xu , Hui-Ling Zhang

Solving a bilevel optimization problem is at the core of several machine learning problems such as hyperparameter tuning, data denoising, meta- and few-shot learning, and training-data poisoning. Different from simultaneous or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Akshay Mehra , Jihun Hamm

Saddle-point optimization problems are an important class of optimization problems with applications to game theory, multi-agent reinforcement learning and machine learning. A majority of the rich literature available for saddle-point…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-05 Abhishek Roy , Yifang Chen , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Prasant Mohapatra

We consider the computation of an equilibrium of a stochastic Nash equilibrium problem, where the player objectives are assumed to be $L_0$-Lipschitz continuous and convex given rival decisions with convex and closed player-specific…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Luke Marrinan , Farzad Yousefian , Uday V. Shanbhag