Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Contextual Stochastic Bilevel Optimization

Yifan Hu · Jie Wang · Yao Xie · Andreas Krause · Daniel Kuhn

Great Hall & Hall B1+B2 (level 1) #1111
[ ]
[ Paper [ Poster [ OpenReview
Wed 13 Dec 3 p.m. PST — 5 p.m. PST

Abstract:

We introduce contextual stochastic bilevel optimization (CSBO) -- a stochastic bilevel optimization framework with the lower-level problem minimizing an expectation conditioned on some contextual information and the upper-level decision variable. This framework extends classical stochastic bilevel optimization when the lower-level decision maker responds optimally not only to the decision of the upper-level decision maker but also to some side information and when there are multiple or even infinite many followers. It captures important applications such as meta-learning, personalized federated learning, end-to-end learning, and Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization with side information (WDRO-SI). Due to the presence of contextual information, existing single-loop methods for classical stochastic bilevel optimization are unable to converge. To overcome this challenge, we introduce an efficient double-loop gradient method based on the Multilevel Monte-Carlo (MLMC) technique and establish its sample and computational complexities. When specialized to stochastic nonconvex optimization, our method matches existing lower bounds. For meta-learning, the complexity of our method does not depend on the number of tasks. Numerical experiments further validate our theoretical results.

Chat is not available.