Double Quantization for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization

Modern distributed training of machine learning models suffers from high communication overhead for synchronizing stochastic gradients and model parameters. In this paper, to reduce the communication complexity, we propose double quantization, a general scheme for quantizing both model parameters and gradients. Three communication-efficient algorithms are proposed under this general scheme. Specifically, (i) we propose a low-precision algorithm AsyLPG with asynchronous parallelism, (ii) we explore integrating gradient sparsification with double quantization and develop Sparse-AsyLPG, (iii) we show that double quantization can also be accelerated by momentum technique and design accelerated AsyLPG. We establish rigorous performance guarantees for the algorithms, and conduct experiments on a multi-server test-bed to demonstrate that our algorithms can effectively save transmitted bits without performance degradation.