147 research outputs found
Nested Distributed Gradient Methods with Adaptive Quantized Communication
In this paper, we consider minimizing a sum of local convex objective
functions in a distributed setting, where communication can be costly. We
propose and analyze a class of nested distributed gradient methods with
adaptive quantized communication (NEAR-DGD+Q). We show the effect of performing
multiple quantized communication steps on the rate of convergence and on the
size of the neighborhood of convergence, and prove R-Linear convergence to the
exact solution with increasing number of consensus steps and adaptive
quantization. We test the performance of the method, as well as some practical
variants, on quadratic functions, and show the effects of multiple quantized
communication steps in terms of iterations/gradient evaluations, communication
and cost.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1709.0299
Distributed Big-Data Optimization via Block-Iterative Convexification and Averaging
In this paper, we study distributed big-data nonconvex optimization in
multi-agent networks. We consider the (constrained) minimization of the sum of
a smooth (possibly) nonconvex function, i.e., the agents' sum-utility, plus a
convex (possibly) nonsmooth regularizer. Our interest is in big-data problems
wherein there is a large number of variables to optimize. If treated by means
of standard distributed optimization algorithms, these large-scale problems may
be intractable, due to the prohibitive local computation and communication
burden at each node. We propose a novel distributed solution method whereby at
each iteration agents optimize and then communicate (in an uncoordinated
fashion) only a subset of their decision variables. To deal with non-convexity
of the cost function, the novel scheme hinges on Successive Convex
Approximation (SCA) techniques coupled with i) a tracking mechanism
instrumental to locally estimate gradient averages; and ii) a novel block-wise
consensus-based protocol to perform local block-averaging operations and
gradient tacking. Asymptotic convergence to stationary solutions of the
nonconvex problem is established. Finally, numerical results show the
effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and highlight how the block dimension
impacts on the communication overhead and practical convergence speed
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