English
Related papers

Related papers: Slow and Stale Gradients Can Win the Race

200 papers

It has been experimentally observed that distributed implementations of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms exhibit speedup saturation and decaying generalization ability beyond a particular batch-size. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-09 Dong Yin , Ashwin Pananjady , Max Lam , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Kannan Ramchandran , Peter Bartlett

Large scale machine learning is increasingly relying on distributed optimization, whereby several machines contribute to the training process of a statistical model. In this work we study the performance of asynchronous, distributed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Rosa Candela , Giulio Franzese , Maurizio Filippone , Pietro Michiardi

We consider distributed gradient descent in the presence of stragglers. Recent work on \em gradient coding \em and \em approximate gradient coding \em have shown how to add redundancy in distributed gradient descent to guarantee convergence…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Rawad Bitar , Mary Wootters , Salim El Rouayheb

SOTA decentralized SGD algorithms can overcome the bandwidth bottleneck at the parameter server by using communication collectives like Ring All-Reduce for synchronization. While the parameter updates in distributed SGD may happen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Haoze He , Parijat Dube

With the fast development of deep learning, it has become common to learn big neural networks using massive training data. Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (ASGD) is widely adopted to fulfill this task for its efficiency, which is,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Shuxin Zheng , Qi Meng , Taifeng Wang , Wei Chen , Nenghai Yu , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Asynchronous stochastic gradient methods are central to scalable distributed optimization, particularly when devices differ in computational capabilities. Such settings arise naturally in federated learning, where training takes place on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-20 Artavazd Maranjyan , Peter Richtárik

We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Sashank J. Reddi , Ahmed Hefny , Suvrit Sra , Barnabás Póczos , Alex Smola

We study the asynchronous stochastic gradient descent algorithm for distributed training over $n$ workers which have varying computation and communication frequency over time. In this algorithm, workers compute stochastic gradients in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Anastasia Koloskova , Sebastian U. Stich , Martin Jaggi

We investigate the problem of minimizing the expectation of smooth nonconvex functions in a distributed setting with multiple parallel workers that are able to compute stochastic gradients. A significant challenge in this context is the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-16 Artavazd Maranjyan , Omar Shaikh Omar , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is an essential element in Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Asynchronous parallel shared-memory SGD (AsyncSGD), including synchronization-free algorithms, e.g. HOGWILD!, have received interest in certain…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Karl Bäckström , Ivan Walulya , Marina Papatriantafilou , Philippas Tsigas

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-07 Saad Mohamad , Hamad Alamri , Abdelhamid Bouchachia

Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly through large neural networks trained on massive datasets using thousands of GPUs or TPUs. Such training can occupy entire data centers for weeks and requires enormous computational and energy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-07 Artavazd Maranjyan

Asynchronous parallel optimization algorithms for solving large-scale machine learning problems have drawn significant attention from academia to industry recently. This paper proposes a novel algorithm, decoupled asynchronous proximal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-24 Yitan Li , Linli Xu , Xiaowei Zhong , Qing Ling

We consider distributed learning in the presence of slow and unresponsive worker nodes, referred to as stragglers. In order to mitigate the effect of stragglers, gradient coding redundantly assigns partial computations to the worker such…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Luis Maßny , Christoph Hofmeister , Maximilian Egger , Rawad Bitar , Antonia Wachter-Zeh

In order to extract the best possible performance from asynchronous stochastic gradient descent one must increase the mini-batch size and scale the learning rate accordingly. In order to achieve further speedup we introduce a technique that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-17 Nikolay Bogoychev , Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt , Kenneth Heafield , Alham Fikri Aji

We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-03-02 Deanna Needell , Rachel Ward

Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) are the predominant approaches to train deep learning models. The adaptive versions (e.g., Adam and AMSGrad) have been extensively used in practice, partly because they achieve faster convergence than the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-14 Yangyang Xu , Yibo Xu , Yonggui Yan , Colin Sutcher-Shepard , Leopold Grinberg , Jie Chen

In distributed computing, slower nodes (stragglers) usually become a bottleneck. Gradient Coding (GC), introduced by Tandon et al., is an efficient technique that uses principles of error-correcting codes to distribute gradient computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 M. Nikhil Krishnan , MohammadReza Ebrahimi , Ashish Khisti

We consider stochastic optimization with delayed gradients where, at each time step $t$, the algorithm makes an update using a stale stochastic gradient from step $t - d_t$ for some arbitrary delay $d_t$. This setting abstracts asynchronous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Alon Cohen , Amit Daniely , Yoel Drori , Tomer Koren , Mariano Schain

One of the most common methods to train machine learning algorithms today is the stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In a distributed setting, SGD-based algorithms have been shown to converge theoretically under specific circumstances. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Soumya Sarkar , Shweta Jain