arXiv · 2609.33176
ABO-Med: Accelerated Bilevel Optimization for Few-Shot Medical Image Classification
Abstract
In recent years, bilevel optimization has been widely used in a variety of machine learning tasks. However, prior bilevel optimization algorithms generally require the computation of second-order information, which limits their practical scalability. Only recently has a first-order paradigm for bilevel optimization been established, attaining near-optimal theoretical guarantees for solving bilevel optimization problems. In this paper, we propose ABO-Med, a scalable instantiation of this paradigm for few-shot learning, by incorporating it into the model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) framework and tailoring it to medical image classification. We also introduce Medical Adaptive RandomAugment (MedRAug), a modality-aware augmentation strategy designed for medical images. Theoretically, ABO-Med establishes the optimality of MAML-type meta-learning approaches. Empirically, ABO-Med outperforms prior baselines on several public medical datasets, with gains of 1.99% to 18.76%, while MedRAug further improves the average accuracy by 2.20% to 6.34%. Additional cross-domain experiments, augmentation ablation studies, backbone ablation studies, and training efficiency analysis further validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Ruoxuan Shi, Sheng Yang, Zhengxing Su, Xiaoyang Hou, Yating Liu. 2026-09-27. ABO-Med: Accelerated Bilevel Optimization for Few-Shot Medical Image Classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33176
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.