Papers › Bilevel Learning with Inexact Stochastic Gradients

Bilevel Learning with Inexact Stochastic Gradients

16 Dec 2024arXiv:2412.12049archive 2025-07-28

Mohammad Sadegh Salehi, Subhadip Mukherjee, Lindon Roberts, Matthias J. Ehrhardt

Bilevel learning has gained prominence in machine learning, inverse problems, and imaging applications, including hyperparameter optimization, learning data-adaptive regularizers, and optimizing forward operators. The large-scale nature of these problems has led to the development of inexact and computationally efficient methods. Existing adaptive methods predominantly rely on deterministic formulations, while stochastic approaches often adopt a doubly-stochastic framework with impractical variance assumptions, enforces a fixed number of lower-level iterations, and requires extensive tuning. In this work, we focus on bilevel learning with strongly convex lower-level problems and a nonconvex sum-of-functions in the upper-level. Stochasticity arises from data sampling in the upper-level which leads to inexact stochastic hypergradients. We establish their connection to state-of-the-art stochastic optimization theory for nonconvex objectives. Furthermore, we prove the convergence of inexact stochastic bilevel optimization under mild assumptions. Our empirical results highlight significant speed-ups and improved generalization in imaging tasks such as image denoising and deblurring in comparison with adaptive deterministic bilevel methods.

PaperPDFCode

Code

MohammadSadeghSalehi/ISGD officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Bilevel OptimizationDeblurringDenoisingHyperparameter OptimizationImage DenoisingStochastic Optimization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

ADOPTFocus

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections