BROS: Bias-Corrected Randomized Subspaces for Memory-Efficient Single-Loop Bilevel Optimization

Abstract

Stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) has become a standard framework for hyperparameter learning, data reweighting, representation learning, and data-mixture optimization in deep learning. Existing exact single-loop SBO methods and memory-efficient surrogate SBO methods either create severe memory pressure for large lower-level neural networks or lack competitive convergence guarantees under standard assumptions. In this paper, we propose BROS, a memory-efficient single-loop SBO method with the same convergence rate order as exact single-loop SBO methods. BROS performs lower and auxiliary updates in randomized subspaces with a Rademacher bi-probe correction that recovers an unbiased Hessian-action estimator. We prove that BROS preserves the $\mathcal O(\varepsilon^{-2})$ sample complexity of MA-SOBA for finding an $\varepsilon$-stationary point under only standard assumptions. Experiments on hyper-data cleaning, data-mixture learning, hyper-representation learning, and ViT sample reweighting show that BROS reduces peak memory by up to 44.9% while closely matching full-space baseline performance.