Amortized Implicit Differentiation for Stochastic Bilevel Optimization

Michael Arbel, Julien Mairal

Keywords: bilevel optimization, stochastic optimization

Abstract:

We study a class of algorithms for solving bilevel optimization problems in both stochastic and deterministic settings when the inner-level objective is strongly convex. Specifically, we consider algorithms based on inexact implicit differentiation and we exploit a warm-start strategy to amortize the estimation of the exact gradient. We then introduce a unified theoretical framework inspired by the study of singularly perturbed systems to analyze such amortized algorithms. By using this framework, our analysis shows these algorithms to match the computational complexity of oracle methods that have access to an unbiased estimate of the gradient, thus outperforming many existing results for bilevel optimization.
We illustrate these findings on synthetic experiments and demonstrate the efficiency of these algorithms on hyper-parameter optimization experiments involving several thousands of variables.

One-sentence Summary: We provide a unified framework for analyzing bilevel optimization algorithm based on approximate implicit differentiation with a warm-start strategy

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2111.14580/code)