Accelerating Finite-Sum Bilevel Optimization with Fully First-Order Oracles

Qihao Zhou, Shanshui Niu

We study nonconvex--strongly-convex bilevel optimization with finite-sum objectives and fully first-order oracles. We propose Sampled Implicit Corrections for Bilevel Optimization (SICBO), which combines a penalty approximation with variance-reduced corrections for the lower-level variables. Under componentwise lower strong convexity, SICBO finds a point $x$ satisfying $\mathbb{E}\|\nablaΦ(x)\|^2\le\varepsilon^2$ within $\tilde{O}(N+\sqrt{N}κ^{7/2}\varepsilon^{-2})$ component-gradient calls, where $N$ is the total number of components and $κ$ is the normalized lower-level condition number. The bound achieves square-root finite-sum dependence using only gradients and preserves the best known deterministic fully first-order condition-number exponent for smooth problems. Our improvement follows from a curvature-dependent bound for nonlinear correction errors, which permits epochs of length $\tildeΘ(\sqrt{N/κ})$ with batches of size $\tildeΘ(\sqrt{Nκ})$. A single-level reduction shows that the dependence on $N$ and $\varepsilon$ is optimal up to logarithmic factors for fixed $κ$.