Title
Communication-Censored Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent
Abstract
This article develops a communication-efficient algorithm to solve the stochastic optimization problem defined over a distributed network, aiming at reducing the burdensome communication in applications, such as distributed machine learning. Different from the existing works based on quantization and sparsification, we introduce a communication-censoring technique to reduce the transmissions of variables, which leads to our communication-censored distributed stochastic gradient descent (CSGD) algorithm. Specifically, in CSGD, the latest minibatch stochastic gradient at a worker will be transmitted to the server if and only if it is sufficiently informative. When the latest gradient is not available, the stale one will be reused at the server. To implement this communication-censoring strategy, the batch size is increasing in order to alleviate the effect of stochastic gradient noise. Theoretically, CSGD enjoys the same order of convergence rate as that of SGD but effectively reduces communication. Numerical experiments demonstrate the sizable communication saving of CSGD.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3083655
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Communication censoring,communication efficiency,distributed optimization,stochastic gradient descent (SGD)
Journal
33
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
11
2162-237X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
11
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Weiyu Li100.34
Zhaoxian Wu200.68
Tianyi Chen3437.52
Liping Li417736.54
Qing Ling596860.48