Abstract
Many modern large-scale machine learning problems benefit from decentralized and stochastic optimization. Recent works have shown that utilizing both decentralized computing and local stochastic gradient estimates can outperform stateof-the-art centralized algorithms, in applications involving highly non-convex problems, such as training deep neural networks. In this work, we propose a decentralized stochastic algorithm to deal with certain smooth non-convex problems where there are m nodes in the system, and each node has a large number of samples (denoted as n). Differently from the majority of the existing decentralized learning algorithms for either stochastic or finite-sum problems, our focus is given to both reducing the total communication rounds among the nodes, while accessing the minimum number of local data samples. In particular, we propose an algorithm named D-GET (decentralized gradient estimation and tracking), which jointly performs decentralized gradient estimation (which estimates the local gradient using a subset of local samples) and gradient tracking (which tracks the global full gradient using local estimates). We show that, to achieve certain E stationary solution of the deterministic finite sum problem, the proposed algorithm achieves an O(mn1/2?-1) sample complexity and an O(E-1) communication complexity. These bounds significantly improve upon the best existing bounds of O(mn?-1) and O(?-1), respectively. Similarly, for online problems, the proposed method achieves an O(m?-3/2) sample complexity and an O(E-1) communication complexity.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020 |
Editors | Hal Daume, Aarti Singh |
Publisher | International Machine Learning Society (IMLS) |
Pages | 9154-9165 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781713821120 |
State | Published - 2020 |
Event | 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020 - Virtual, Online Duration: Jul 13 2020 → Jul 18 2020 |
Publication series
Name | 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020 |
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Volume | PartF168147-12 |
Conference
Conference | 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020 |
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City | Virtual, Online |
Period | 7/13/20 → 7/18/20 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors were supported by NSF under the grant CIF-1910385 and in part by an AFOSR grant 19RT0424, and an ARO grant W911NF-19-1-0247.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020. All rights reserved.