With the growth of data and necessity for distributed optimization methods, solvers that work well on a single machine must be re-designed to leverage distributed computation. Recent work in this area has been limited by focusing heavily on developing highly specific methods for the distributed environment. These special-purpose methods are often unable to fully leverage the competitive performance of their well-tuned and customized single machine counterparts. Further, they are unable to easily integrate improvements that continue to be made to single machine methods. To this end, we present a framework for distributed optimization that both allows the flexibility of arbitrary solvers to be used on each (single) machine locally, and yet maintains competitive performance against other state-of-the-art special-purpose distributed methods. We give strong primal-dual convergence rate guarantees for our framework that hold for arbitrary local solvers. We demonstrate the impact of local solver selection both theoretically and in an extensive experimental comparison. Finally, we provide thorough implementation details for our framework, highlighting areas for practical performance gains.
The current state of the art for empirical loss minimization with strongly convex regularizers is randomized coordinate ascent on the dual objective --- Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (SDCA) @cite_21 . In contrast to primal SGD methods, the SDCA algorithm family is often preferred as it is free of learning-rate parameters, and has faster (geometric) convergence guarantees. This algorithm and its variants are increasingly used in practice @cite_62 @cite_9 . On the other hand, primal-only methods apply to a larger problem class, not only of form that enables formation of dual problem as considered here.
@cite_9 @cite_21 @cite_62
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We develop an accelerated randomized proximal coordinate gradient (APCG) method, for solving a broad class of composite convex optimization problems. In particular, our method achieves faster linear convergence rates for minimizing strongly convex functions than existing randomized proximal coordinate gradient methods. We show how to apply the APCG method to solve the dual of the regularized empirical risk minimization (ERM) problem, and devise efficient implementations that avoid full-dimensional vector operations. For ill-conditioned ERM problems, our method obtains improved convergence rates than the state-of-the-art stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA) method. Stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA) is an effective technique for solving regularized loss minimization problems in machine learning. This paper considers an extension of SDCA under the mini-batch setting that is often used in practice. Our main contribution is to introduce an accelerated mini-batch version of SDCA and prove a fast convergence rate for this method. We discuss an implementation of our method over a parallel computing system, and compare the results to both the vanilla stochastic dual coordinate ascent and to the accelerated deterministic gradient descent method of nesterov2007gradient . Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent is a popular method for solving regularized loss minimization for the case of convex losses. We describe variants of SDCA that do not require explicit regularization and do not rely on duality. We prove linear convergence rates even if individual loss functions are non-convex, as long as the expected loss is strongly convex.