cs.LGFeb 27, 2026

On the Convergence of Single-Loop Stochastic Bilevel Optimization with Approximate Implicit Differentiation

Authors: Yubo Zhou, Luo Luo, Guang Dai, Haishan Ye

Organizations: Xi’an Jiaotong University · Fudan University · SGIT AI Lab

Abstract

Stochastic Bilevel Optimization has emerged as a fundamental framework for meta-learning and hyperparameter optimization. Despite the practical prevalence of single-loop algorithms, their theoretical understanding in the stochastic regime remains less developed than that of multi-loop methods. In this paper, we provide a refined convergence analysis of the Single-loop Stochastic Approximate Implicit Differentiation (SSAID) algorithm. Under the squared-gradient stationarity criterion ∥∇Φ(x)∥2≤ε\|\nablaΦ(x)\|^2\leε, the corrected proof establishes an oracle complexity of O(κ14ε−2)\mathcal{O}(κ^{14}ε^{-2}), equivalently an averaged stationarity rate of O(κ7K−1/2)\mathcal{O}(κ^7K^{-1/2}). The result preserves the canonical O(ε−2)\mathcal{O}(ε^{-2}) dependence on the target accuracy while giving an explicit characterization of the condition-number dependence for stochastic AID-based single-loop methods.

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