Adding vs. averaging in distributed primal-dual optimization

Chenxin Ma, Virginia Smith, Martin Jaggi, Michael I. Jordan, Peter Richtárik, Martin Takáč

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

87 Scopus citations

Abstract

Distributed optimization methods for large-scale machine learning suffer from a communication bottleneck. It is difficult to reduce this bottleneck while still efficiently and accurately aggregating partial work from different machines. In this paper, we present a novel generalization of the recent communication-efficient primal-dual framework (CoCoA) for distributed optimization. Our framework, CoCoA+, allows for additive combination of local updates to the global parameters at each iteration, whereas previous schemes with convergence guarantees only allow conservative averaging. We give stronger (primal-dual) convergence rate guarantees for both CoCoA as well as our new variants, and generalize the theory for both methods to cover non-smooth convex loss functions. We provide an extensive experimental comparison that shows the markedly improved performance of CoCoA+ on several real-world distributed datasets, especially when scaling up the number of machines.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication32nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2015
PublisherInternational Machine Learning Society (IMLS)[email protected]
Pages1973-1982
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)9781510810587
StatePublished - Jan 1 2015
Externally publishedYes

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