Bilevel optimization of the Kantorovich problem and its quadratic regularization

Abstract

This paper is concerned with an optimization problem which is governed by the Kantorovich problem of optimal transport. More precisely, we consider a bilevel optimization problem with the underlying problem being the Kantorovich problem. This task can be reformulated as a mathematical problem with complementarity constraints in the space of regular Borel measures. Because of the non-smoothness that is induced by the complementarity constraints, problems of this type are often regularized, e.g., by an entropic regularization. However, in this paper we apply a quadratic regularization to the Kantorovich problem. By doing so, we are able to drastically reduce its dimension while preserving the sparsity structure of the optimal transportation plan as much as possible. As the title indicates, this is the second part in a series of three papers. While the existence of optimal solutions to both the bilevel Kantorovich problem and its regularized counterpart were shown in the first part, this paper deals with the (weak-) convergence of solutions to the regularized bilevel problem to solutions of the original bilevel Kantorovich problem for vanishing regularization parameters.