BOME! Bilevel Optimization Made Easy: A Simple First-Order Approach

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper Supplemental

Authors

Bo Liu, Mao Ye, Stephen Wright, Peter Stone, Qiang Liu

Abstract

Bilevel optimization (BO) is useful for solving a variety of important machine learning problems including but not limited to hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning, continual learning, and reinforcement learning.Conventional BO methods need to differentiate through the low-level optimization process with implicit differentiation, which requires expensive calculations related to the Hessian matrix. There has been a recent quest for first-order methods for BO, but the methods proposed to date tend to be complicated and impractical for large-scale deep learning applications. In this work, we propose a simple first-order BO algorithm that depends only on first-order gradient information, requires no implicit differentiation, and is practical and efficient for large-scale non-convex functions in deep learning. We provide non-asymptotic convergence analysis of the proposed method to stationary points for non-convex objectives and present empirical results that show its superior practical performance.