Towards Optimal Communication Complexity in Distributed Non-Convex Optimization
Main Conference Track
Authors: Kumar Kshitij Patel, Lingxiao Wang, Blake E. Woodworth, Brian Bullins, Nati Srebro

We study the problem of distributed stochastic non-convex optimization with intermittent communication. We consider the full participation setting where $M$ machines work in parallel over $R$ communication rounds and the partial participation setting where $M$ machines are sampled independently every round from some meta-distribution over machines. We propose and analyze a new algorithm that improves existing methods by requiring fewer and lighter variance reduction operations. We also present lower bounds, showing our algorithm is either $\textit{optimal}$ or $\textit{almost optimal}$ in most settings. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm.