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Poster
in
Workshop: OPT 2021: Optimization for Machine Learning

A Stochastic Momentum Method for Min-max Bilevel Optimization

Quanqi Hu · Bokun Wang · Tianbao Yang


Abstract: In this paper, we study nonconvex min-max bilevel optimization problem where the outer objective function is non-convex and strongly concave and the inner objective function is strongly convex. This paper develops a single loop single timescale stochastic algorithm based on moving average estimator, which only requires a general unbiased stochastic oracle with bounded variance. To the best of our knowledge, the only existing work on min-max bilevel optimization focuses on the ones with an upper objective in certain structure and only achieves an oracle complexity of \cO(ϵ5). Under some mild assumptions on the partial derivatives of both outer and inner objective functions, we provide the first convergence guarantee with an oracle complexity of \cO(ϵ4) for a general class of min-max bilevel problems, which matches the optimal complexity order for solving stochastic nonconvex optimization under a general unbiased stochastic oracle model.

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