Communication-Efficient Distributed Dual Coordinate Ascent

NeurIPS 2014 · Martin Jaggi, Virginia Smith, Martin Takáč, Jonathan Terhorst, Sanjay Krishnan, Thomas Hofmann, Michael. I. Jordan ·

Communication remains the most significant bottleneck in the performance of distributed optimization algorithms for large-scale machine learning. In this paper, we propose a communication-efficient framework, CoCoA, that uses local computation in a primal-dual setting to dramatically reduce the amount of necessary communication. We provide a strong convergence rate analysis for this class of algorithms, as well as experiments on real-world distributed datasets with implementations in Spark. In our experiments, we find that as compared to state-of-the-art mini-batch versions of SGD and SDCA algorithms, CoCoA converges to the same .001-accurate solution quality on average 25x as quickly.