Coordinating Distributed Example Orders for Provably Accelerated Training
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Abstract (arXiv)
Recent research on online Gradient Balancing (GraB) has revealed that there exist permutation-based example orderings for SGD that are guaranteed to outperform random reshuffling (RR). Whereas RR arbitrarily permutes training examples, GraB leverages stale gradients from prior epochs to order examples -- achieving a provably faster convergence rate than RR. However, GraB is limited by design: while it demonstrates an impressive ability to scale-up training on centralized data, it does not naturally extend to modern distributed ML workloads. We therefore propose Coordinated Distributed GraB (CD-GraB), which uses insights from prior work on kernel thinning to translate the benefits of provably faster permutation-based example ordering to distributed settings. With negligible overhead, CD-GraB exhibits a linear speedup in convergence rate over centralized GraB and outperforms distributed RR on a variety of benchmark tasks.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2023.
Builds on
30 of 54 references.
References · 30
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18 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 2; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
7 papers.
- 2025SonicMoE: Accelerating MoE with IO and Tile-aware Optimizationscited by 20
- 2024Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy and Researchcited by 14
- 2023On Convergence of Incremental Gradient for Non-Convex Smooth Functionscited by 7
- 2025Low-Rank Thinningcited by 7
- 2024Efficient and Accurate Explanation Estimation with Distribution Compressioncited by 4
- 2023GraB-sampler: Optimal Permutation-based SGD Data Sampler for PyTorchcited by 0
- 2026When Is Deletion Ordering Tractable? From Update Dynamics to Permutation Structurecited by 0
- 2026When Is Deletion Ordering Tractable? From Update Dynamics to Permutation Structure1 Oct 2026
- 2025SonicMoE: Accelerating MoE with IO and Tile-aware Optimizations16 Dec 2025
- 2025Low-Rank Thinning17 Feb 2025
- 2024Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy and Research9 Dec 2024
- 2024Efficient and Accurate Explanation Estimation with Distribution Compression26 Jun 2024
- 2023GraB-sampler: Optimal Permutation-based SGD Data Sampler for PyTorch28 Sep 2023
- 2023On Convergence of Incremental Gradient for Non-Convex Smooth Functions30 May 2023