Optimal Shrinkage for Distributed Second-Order Optimization
Authors: Fangzhao Zhang, Mert Pilanci

In this work, we address the problem of Hessian inversion bias in distributed second-order optimization algorithms. We introduce a novel shrinkage-based estimator for the resolvent of gram matrices which is asymptotically unbiased, and characterize its non-asymptotic convergence rate in the isotropic case. We apply this estimator to bias correction of Newton steps in distributed second-order optimization algorithms, as well as randomized sketching based methods. We examine the bias present in the naive averaging-based distributed Newton’s method using analytical expressions and contrast it with our proposed biasfree approach. Our approach leads to significant improvements in convergence rate compared to standard baselines and recent proposals, as shown through experiments on both real and synthetic datasets.