A Double Residual Compression Algorithm for Efficient Distributed Learning

Large-scale machine learning models are often trained by parallel stochastic gradient descent algorithms. However, the communication cost of gradient aggregation and model synchronization between the master and worker nodes becomes the major obstacle for efficient learning as the number of workers and the dimension of the model increase. In this paper, we propose DORE, a DOuble REsidual compression stochastic gradient descent algorithm, to reduce over 95% of the overall communication such that the obstacle can be immensely mitigated. Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that the proposed strategy has superior convergence properties for both strongly convex and nonconvex objective functions. The experimental results validate that DORE achieves the best communication efficiency while maintaining similar model accuracy and convergence speed in comparison with start-of-the-art baselines.