Accelerated Fully First-Order Methods for Bilevel and Minimax Optimization
For researchers in optimization and machine learning, this work provides more efficient algorithms for bilevel and minimax problems, which are central to many applications like hyperparameter tuning and adversarial training.
This paper proposes novel accelerated fully first-order methods for bilevel and minimax optimization, achieving state-of-the-art oracle query complexities for finding approximate first- and second-order stationary points. The methods outperform existing approaches on real-world problems.
We present in this paper novel accelerated fully first-order methods in \emph{Bilevel Optimization} (BLO). Firstly, for BLO under the assumption that the lower-level functions admit the typical strong convexity assumption, the \emph{(Perturbed) Restarted Accelerated Fully First-order methods for Bilevel Approximation} (\texttt{PRAF${}^2$BA}) algorithm leveraging \emph{fully} first-order oracles is proposed, whereas the algorithm for finding approximate first-order and second-order stationary points with state-of-the-art oracle query complexities in solving complex optimization tasks. Secondly, applying as a special case of BLO the \emph{nonconvex-strongly-convex} (NCSC) minimax optimization, \texttt{PRAF${}^2$BA} rediscovers \emph{perturbed restarted accelerated gradient descent ascent} (\texttt{PRAGDA}) that achieves the state-of-the-art complexity for finding approximate second-order stationary points. Additionally, we investigate the challenge of finding stationary points of the hyper-objective function in BLO when lower-level functions lack the typical strong convexity assumption, where we identify several regularity conditions of the lower-level problems that ensure tractability and present hardness results indicating the intractability of BLO for general convex lower-level functions. Under these regularity conditions we propose the \emph{Inexact Gradient-Free Method} (\texttt{IGFM}), utilizing the \emph{Switching Gradient Method} (\texttt{SGM}) as an efficient sub-routine to find an approximate stationary point of the hyper-objective in polynomial time. Empirical studies for real-world problems are provided to further validate the outperformance of our proposed algorithms.