Parallel and Distributed Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Algorithms

We develop parallel and distributed Frank-Wolfe algorithms; the former on shared memory machines with mini-batching, and the latter in a delayed update framework. Whenever possible, we perform computations asynchronously, which helps attain speedups on multicore machines as well as in distributed environments. Moreover, instead of worst-case bounded delays, our methods only depend (mildly) on expected delays, allowing them to be robust to stragglers and faulty worker threads. Our algorithms assume block-separable constraints, and subsume the recent Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe (BCFW) method~citeplacoste2013block. Our analysis reveals problem-dependent quantities that govern the speedups of our methods over BCFW. We present experiments on structural SVM and Group Fused Lasso, obtaining significant speedups over competing state-of-the-art (and synchronous) methods.