Title: Reducing Contextual Stochastic Bilevel Optimization via Structured Function Approximation
Primary area: optimization
Keywords: stochastic optimization, bilevel optimization, contextual stochastic optimization, parametrization

Abstract: Contextual Stochastic Bilevel Optimization (CSBO) extends standard stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) by incorporating context-dependent lower-level problems. CSBO problems are generally intractable since existing methods require solving a distinct lower-level problem for each sampled context, resulting in prohibitive sample and computational complexity, in addition to relying on impractical conditional sampling oracles. We propose a reduction framework that approximates the lower-level solutions using expressive basis functions, thereby decoupling the lower-level dependence on context and transforming CSBO into a standard SBO problem solvable using only joint samples from the context and noise distribution. First, we show that this reduction preserves hypergradient accuracy and yields an $\epsilon$-stationary solution to CSBO. Then, we relate the sample complexity of the reduced problem to simple metrics of the basis. This establishes sufficient criteria for a basis to yield $\epsilon$-stationary solutions with a near-optimal complexity of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-3})$, matching the best-known rate for standard SBO up to logarithmic factors. Moreover, we show that Chebyshev polynomials provide a concrete and efficient choice of basis that satisfies these criteria for a broad class of problems. Empirical results on inverse and hyperparameter optimization demonstrate that our approach outperforms CSBO baselines in convergence, sample efficiency, and memory usage.

TL;DR: By parametrizing the context‐specific lower‐level solutions, CSBO can be reduced to a standard SBO problem and solved with near-optimal sample complexity.