Sharp propagation of chaos for mean-field backward stochastic differential equations

Abstract

We study propagation of chaos for decoupled mean-field forward-backward stochastic differential equations whose generators depend on the empirical laws of the forward states, backward values and diagonal martingale integrands. Under monotonicity and Lipschitz assumptions, synchronous coupling gives quantitative estimates, including an $m$-particle squared Wasserstein bound of order $m/n$ for a system of $n$ particles interacting through finitely many statistics. In the Markovian setting, assuming a sufficiently regular classical decoupling field, we obtain two sharp refinements. For constant invertible diffusion and first-order cancellation of the field's measure dependence along the limiting law flow, the squared Wasserstein error is of order $m^2/n^2$, on continuous-path space for the values and on $L^2$ for the diagonal integrands. Without imposing this cancellation, smooth weak errors have order $n^{-1}$ for every fixed marginal, allowing variable and possibly degenerate diffusion. The weak estimate is uniform on a fixed time interval for the values and integrated in time for the integrands. The argument compares the interacting BSDE with an empirical evaluation of the decoupling field, retaining the full martingale representation and controlling feedback through both backward laws. It yields a joint-path Wasserstein transfer bound with intrinsic squared error $m/n^2$, off-diagonal integrand estimates, and a weak-error transfer principle with additive error $n^{-1}$. Explicit models with feedback through both backward laws verify the cancellation assumptions. Examples distinguish the intrinsic backward error from the forward law error and establish matching lower bounds for each backward component.