We study the problem of high-dimensional sparse linear regression in a distributed setting under both computational and communication constraints. Specifically, we consider a star topology network whereby several machines are connected to a fusion center, with whom they can exchange relatively short messages. Each machine holds noisy samples from a linear regression model with the same unknown sparse $d$-dimensional vector of regression coefficients $\theta$. The goal of the fusion center is to estimate the vector $\theta$ and its support using few computations and limited communication at each machine. In this work, we consider distributed algorithms based on Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) and theoretically study their ability to exactly recover the support of $\theta$. We prove that under certain conditions, even at low signal-to-noise-ratios where individual machines are unable to detect the support of $\theta$, distributed-OMP methods correctly recover it with total communication sublinear in $d$. In addition, we present simulations that illustrate the performance of distributed OMP-based algorithms and show that they perform similarly to more sophisticated and computationally intensive methods, and in some cases even outperform them.
Distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with gradient compression has emerged as a communication-efficient solution to accelerate distributed learning. Top-K sparsification is one of the most popular gradient compression methods that sparsifies the gradient in a fixed degree during model training. However, there lacks an approach to adaptively adjust the degree of sparsification to maximize the potential of model performance or training speed. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a novel adaptive Top-K SGD framework, enabling adaptive degree of sparsification for each gradient descent step to maximize the convergence performance by exploring the trade-off between communication cost and convergence error. Firstly, we derive an upper bound of the convergence error for the adaptive sparsification scheme and the loss function. Secondly, we design the algorithm by minimizing the convergence error under the communication cost constraints. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed adaptive Top-K in SGD achieves a significantly better convergence rate compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
In the modern paradigm of federated learning, a large number of users are involved in a global learning task, in a collaborative way. They alternate local computations and two-way communication with a distant orchestrating server. Communication, which can be slow and costly, is the main bottleneck in this setting. To reduce the communication load and therefore accelerate distributed gradient descent, two strategies are popular: 1) communicate less frequently; that is, perform several iterations of local computations between the communication rounds; and 2) communicate compressed information instead of full-dimensional vectors. In this paper, we propose the first algorithm for distributed optimization and federated learning, which harnesses these two strategies jointly and converges linearly to an exact solution, with a doubly accelerated rate: our algorithm benefits from the two acceleration mechanisms provided by local training and compression, namely a better dependency on the condition number of the functions and on the dimension of the model, respectively.
We propose the Terminating-Random Experiments (T-Rex) selector, a fast variable selection method for high-dimensional data. The T-Rex selector controls a user-defined target false discovery rate (FDR) while maximizing the number of selected variables. This is achieved by fusing the solutions of multiple early terminated random experiments. The experiments are conducted on a combination of the original predictors and multiple sets of randomly generated dummy predictors. A finite sample proof based on martingale theory for the FDR control property is provided. Numerical simulations confirm that the FDR is controlled at the target level while allowing for a high power. We prove under mild conditions that the dummies can be sampled from any univariate probability distribution with finite expectation and variance. The computational complexity of the proposed method is linear in the number of variables. The T-Rex selector outperforms state-of-the-art methods for FDR control on a simulated genome-wide association study (GWAS), while its sequential computation time is more than two orders of magnitude lower than that of the strongest benchmark methods. The open source R package TRexSelector containing the implementation of the T-Rex selector is available on CRAN.
Distributed statistical learning problems arise commonly when dealing with large datasets. In this setup, datasets are partitioned over machines, which compute locally, and communicate short messages. Communication is often the bottleneck. In this paper, we study one-step and iterative weighted parameter averaging in statistical linear models under data parallelism. We do linear regression on each machine, send the results to a central server, and take a weighted average of the parameters. Optionally, we iterate, sending back the weighted average and doing local ridge regressions centered at it. How does this work compared to doing linear regression on the full data? Here we study the performance loss in estimation, test error, and confidence interval length in high dimensions, where the number of parameters is comparable to the training data size. We find the performance loss in one-step weighted averaging, and also give results for iterative averaging. We also find that different problems are affected differently by the distributed framework. Estimation error and confidence interval length increase a lot, while prediction error increases much less. We rely on recent results from random matrix theory, where we develop a new calculus of deterministic equivalents as a tool of broader interest.
Simultaneously identifying contributory variables and controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) in high-dimensional data is an important statistical problem. In this paper, we propose a novel model-free variable selection procedure in sufficient dimension reduction via data splitting technique. The variable selection problem is first connected with a least square procedure with several response transformations. We construct a series of statistics with global symmetry property and then utilize the symmetry to derive a data-driven threshold to achieve error rate control. This method can achieve finite-sample and asymptotic FDR control under some mild conditions. Numerical experiments indicate that our procedure has satisfactory FDR control and higher power compared with existing methods.
This paper aims to explore the feasibility of the spectrum sharing between the communication and radar system. We investigate the full-duplex (FD) joint radar and communication multi-antenna system in which a node labeled ComRad with a dual communication and radar capability is communicating with a downlink and an uplink users, as well as detecting the target of interest simultaneously. Considering a full interference scenario and imperfect channel state information (CSI), the fundamental performance limits of the FD JRC system are analyzed. In particular, we first obtain the downlink rate when the radar signals act as interference. Then, viewing the uplink channel and radar return channel as a multiple access channel, we propose an alternative successive interference cancellation scheme, based on which the achievable uplink communication rate is obtained. For the radar operation, we first derive the general expression of the estimation rate, which quantifies how much information is obtained about the target in terms of the direction, the range and the velocity. Considering the uniform linear antenna array and linear frequency modulated radar signals, we further obtain the exact closed-form estimation rate. Numerical simulations reveal that the joint manner of the communication and radar operations achieves larger rate regions compared to that of working independently.
The study of robustness has received much attention due to its inevitability in data-driven settings where many systems face uncertainty. One such example of concern is Bayesian Optimization (BO), where uncertainty is multi-faceted, yet there only exists a limited number of works dedicated to this direction. In particular, there is the work of Kirschner et al. (2020), which bridges the existing literature of Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) by casting the BO problem from the lens of DRO. While this work is pioneering, it admittedly suffers from various practical shortcomings such as finite contexts assumptions, leaving behind the main question Can one devise a computationally tractable algorithm for solving this DRO-BO problem? In this work, we tackle this question to a large degree of generality by considering robustness against data-shift in $\phi$-divergences, which subsumes many popular choices, such as the $\chi^2$-divergence, Total Variation, and the extant Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. We show that the DRO-BO problem in this setting is equivalent to a finite-dimensional optimization problem which, even in the continuous context setting, can be easily implemented with provable sublinear regret bounds. We then show experimentally that our method surpasses existing methods, attesting to the theoretical results.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
The aim of this work is to develop a fully-distributed algorithmic framework for training graph convolutional networks (GCNs). The proposed method is able to exploit the meaningful relational structure of the input data, which are collected by a set of agents that communicate over a sparse network topology. After formulating the centralized GCN training problem, we first show how to make inference in a distributed scenario where the underlying data graph is split among different agents. Then, we propose a distributed gradient descent procedure to solve the GCN training problem. The resulting model distributes computation along three lines: during inference, during back-propagation, and during optimization. Convergence to stationary solutions of the GCN training problem is also established under mild conditions. Finally, we propose an optimization criterion to design the communication topology between agents in order to match with the graph describing data relationships. A wide set of numerical results validate our proposal. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work combining graph convolutional neural networks with distributed optimization.
Federated learning is a new distributed machine learning framework, where a bunch of heterogeneous clients collaboratively train a model without sharing training data. In this work, we consider a practical and ubiquitous issue in federated learning: intermittent client availability, where the set of eligible clients may change during the training process. Such an intermittent client availability model would significantly deteriorate the performance of the classical Federated Averaging algorithm (FedAvg for short). We propose a simple distributed non-convex optimization algorithm, called Federated Latest Averaging (FedLaAvg for short), which leverages the latest gradients of all clients, even when the clients are not available, to jointly update the global model in each iteration. Our theoretical analysis shows that FedLaAvg attains the convergence rate of $O(1/(N^{1/4} T^{1/2}))$, achieving a sublinear speedup with respect to the total number of clients. We implement and evaluate FedLaAvg with the CIFAR-10 dataset. The evaluation results demonstrate that FedLaAvg indeed reaches a sublinear speedup and achieves 4.23% higher test accuracy than FedAvg.