No Arabic abstract
Optimization in distributed networks plays a central role in almost all distributed machine learning problems. In principle, the use of distributed task allocation has reduced the computational time, allowing better response rates and higher data reliability. However, for these computational algorithms to run effectively in complex distributed systems, the algorithms ought to compensate for communication asynchrony, and network node failures and delays known as stragglers. These issues can change the effective connection topology of the network, which may vary through time, thus hindering the optimization process. In this paper, we propose a new distributed unconstrained optimization algorithm for minimizing a strongly convex function which is adaptable to a parameter server network. In particular, the network worker nodes solve their local optimization problems, allowing the computation of their local coded gradients, and send them to different server nodes. Then each server node aggregates its communicated local gradients, allowing convergence to the desired optimizer. This algorithm is robust to network worker node failures or disconnection, or delays known as stragglers. One way to overcome the straggler problem is to allow coding over the network. We further extend this coding framework to enhance the convergence of the proposed algorithm under such varying network topologies. Finally, we implement the proposed scheme in MATLAB and provide comparative results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Optimization in distributed networks plays a central role in almost all distributed machine learning problems. In principle, the use of distributed task allocation has reduced the computational time, allowing better response rates and higher data reliability. However, for these computational algorithms to run effectively in complex distributed systems, the algorithms ought to compensate for communication asynchrony, network node failures and delays known as stragglers. These issues can change the effective connection topology of the network, which may vary over time, thus hindering the optimization process. In this paper, we propose a new distributed unconstrained optimization algorithm for minimizing a convex function which is adaptable to a parameter server network. In particular, the network worker nodes solve their local optimization problems, allowing the computation of their local coded gradients, which will be sent to different server nodes. Then within this parameter server platform each server node aggregates its communicated local gradients, allowing convergence to the desired optimizer. This algorithm is robust to network s worker node failures, disconnection, or delaying nodes known as stragglers. One way to overcome the straggler problem is to allow coding over the network. We further extend this coding framework to enhance the convergence of the proposed algorithm under such varying network topologies. By using coding and utilizing evaluations of gradients of uniformly bounded delay we further enhance the proposed algorithm performance. Finally, we implement the proposed scheme in MATLAB and provide comparative results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework
This paper presents an asynchronous incremental aggregated gradient algorithm and its implementation in a parameter server framework for solving regularized optimization problems. The algorithm can handle both general convex (possibly non-smooth) regularizers and general convex constraints. When the empirical data loss is strongly convex, we establish linear convergence rate, give explicit expressions for step-size choices that guarantee convergence to the optimum, and bound the associated convergence factors. The expressions have an explicit dependence on the degree of asynchrony and recover classical results under synchronous operation. Simulations and implementations on commercial compute clouds validate our findings.
Various types of parameter restart schemes have been proposed for accelerated gradient algorithms to facilitate their practical convergence in convex optimization. However, the convergence properties of accelerated gradient algorithms under parameter restart remain obscure in nonconvex optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated proximal gradient algorithm with parameter restart (named APG-restart) for solving nonconvex and nonsmooth problems. Our APG-restart is designed to 1) allow for adopting flexible parameter restart schemes that cover many existing ones; 2) have a global sub-linear convergence rate in nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization; and 3) have guaranteed convergence to a critical point and have various types of asymptotic convergence rates depending on the parameterization of local geometry in nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.
A cumbersome operation in numerical analysis and linear algebra, optimization, machine learning and engineering algorithms; is inverting large full-rank matrices which appears in various processes and applications. This has both numerical stability and complexity issues, as well as high expected time to compute. We address the latter issue, by proposing an algorithm which uses a black-box least squares optimization solver as a subroutine, to give an estimate of the inverse (and pseudoinverse) of real nonsingular matrices; by estimating its columns. This also gives it the flexibility to be performed in a distributed manner, thus the estimate can be obtained a lot faster, and can be made robust to textit{stragglers}. Furthermore, we assume a centralized network with no message passing between the computing nodes, and do not require a matrix factorization; e.g. LU, SVD or QR decomposition beforehand.
We study distributed stochastic gradient (D-SG) method and its accelerated variant (D-ASG) for solving decentralized strongly convex stochastic optimization problems where the objective function is distributed over several computational units, lying on a fixed but arbitrary connected communication graph, subject to local communication constraints where noisy estimates of the gradients are available. We develop a framework which allows to choose the stepsize and the momentum parameters of these algorithms in a way to optimize performance by systematically trading off the bias, variance, robustness to gradient noise and dependence to network effects. When gradients do not contain noise, we also prove that distributed accelerated methods can emph{achieve acceleration}, requiring $mathcal{O}(kappa log(1/varepsilon))$ gradient evaluations and $mathcal{O}(kappa log(1/varepsilon))$ communications to converge to the same fixed point with the non-accelerated variant where $kappa$ is the condition number and $varepsilon$ is the target accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first acceleration result where the iteration complexity scales with the square root of the condition number in the context of emph{primal} distributed inexact first-order methods. For quadratic functions, we also provide finer performance bounds that are tight with respect to bias and variance terms. Finally, we study a multistage version of D-ASG with parameters carefully varied over stages to ensure exact $mathcal{O}(-k/sqrt{kappa})$ linear decay in the bias term as well as optimal $mathcal{O}(sigma^2/k)$ in the variance term. We illustrate through numerical experiments that our approach results in practical algorithms that are robust to gradient noise and that can outperform existing methods.