# Locally Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent for Decentralised Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13085 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13085/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Can Decentralized Algorithms Outperform Centralized Algorithms? A Case Study for Decentralized Parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09056/) (2017)
- [Horovod: fast and easy distributed deep learning in TensorFlow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05799/) (2018)
- [MXNet: A Flexible and Efficient Machine Learning Library for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.01274/) (2015)
- [Asynchronous Decentralized Parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06952/) (2017)
- [Stochastic Gradient Push for Distributed Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10792/) (2018)
- [D2: Decentralized Training over Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07068/) (2018)
- [CondenseNet: An Efficient DenseNet using Learned Group Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09224/) (2017)
- [Deep learning with Elastic Averaging SGD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6651/) (2014)
- [Collaborative Deep Learning in Fixed Topology Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07880/) (2017)
- [Stochastic Gradient-Push for Strongly Convex Functions on Time-Varying Directed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2075/) (2014)
- [Pipe-SGD: A Decentralized Pipelined SGD Framework for Distributed Deep Net Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03619/) (2018)
- [Extremely Large Minibatch SGD: Training ResNet-50 on ImageNet in 15 Minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04325/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DIGEST: Fast and Communication Efficient Decentralized Learning with Local Updates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07652/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distributed training algorithms of deep neural networks show impressive convergence speedup properties on very large problems. However, they inherently suffer from communication related slowdowns and communication topology becomes a crucial design choice. Common approaches supported by most machine learning frameworks are: 1) Synchronous decentralized algorithms relying on a peer-to-peer All Reduce topology that is sensitive to stragglers and communication delays. 2) Asynchronous centralised algorithms with a server based topology that is prone to communication bottleneck. Researchers also suggested asynchronous decentralized algorithms designed to avoid the bottleneck and speedup training, however, those commonly use inexact sparse averaging that may lead to a degradation in accuracy. In this paper, we propose Local Asynchronous SGD (LASGD), an asynchronous decentralized algorithm that relies on All Reduce for model synchronization. We empirically validate LASGD's performance on image classification tasks on the ImageNet dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that LASGD accelerates training compared to SGD and state of the art gossip based approaches.