Abstract
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 − dt for some arbitrary delay dt. This setting abstracts asynchronous distributed optimization where a central server receives gradient updates computed by worker machines. These machines can experience computation and communication loads that might vary significantly over time. In the general non-convex smooth optimization setting, we give a simple and efficient algorithm that requires O(σ2/ϵ4 + τ/ϵ2) steps for finding an ϵ-stationary point x, where τ is the average delayT1∑Tt=1 dt and σ2 is the variance of the stochastic gradients. This improves over previous work, which showed that stochastic gradient decent achieves the same rate but with respect to the maximal delay maxt dt, that can be significantly larger than the average delay especially in heterogeneous distributed systems. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our algorithm in cases where the delay distribution is skewed or heavy-tailed.
Original language | American English |
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Title of host publication | Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 - 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 |
Editors | Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Alina Beygelzimer, Yann Dauphin, Percy S. Liang, Jenn Wortman Vaughan |
Publisher | Neural information processing systems foundation |
Pages | 9024-9035 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781713845393 |
State | Published - 2021 |
Event | 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 - Virtual, Online Duration: 6 Dec 2021 → 14 Dec 2021 |
Publication series
Name | Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems |
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Volume | 11 |
ISSN (Print) | 1049-5258 |
Conference
Conference | 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 |
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City | Virtual, Online |
Period | 6/12/21 → 14/12/21 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:AD is partially supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) grant no. 2258/19. TK is partially supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) grant no. 2549/19, by the Len Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family foundation, and by the Yandex Initiative in Machine Learning.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Neural information processing systems foundation. All rights reserved.