This paper investigates how to accelerate the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on nonconvex problems with zeroth-order information available only. We propose a zeroth-order (ZO) distributed primal-dual stochastic coordinates algorit
hm equipped with powerball method to accelerate. We prove that the proposed algorithm has a convergence rate of $mathcal{O}(sqrt{p}/sqrt{nT})$ for general nonconvex cost functions. We consider solving the generation of adversarial examples from black-box DNNs problem to compare with the existing state-of-the-art centralized and distributed ZO algorithms. The numerical results demonstrate the faster convergence rate of the proposed algorithm and match the theoretical analysis.
This paper investigates accelerating the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on non-convex problems. We propose a distributed primal-dual stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) equipped with powerball method to accelerate. We show that the
proposed algorithm achieves the linear speedup convergence rate $mathcal{O}(1/sqrt{nT})$ for general smooth (possibly non-convex) cost functions. We demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm through numerical experiments by training two-layer fully connected neural networks and convolutional neural networks on the MNIST dataset to compare with state-of-the-art distributed SGD algorithms and centralized SGD algorithms.
