Papers › CoCoA: A General Framework for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization

CoCoA: A General Framework for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization

7 Nov 2016arXiv:1611.02189archive 2025-07-28

Virginia Smith, Simone Forte, Chenxin Ma, Martin Takac, Michael. I. Jordan, Martin Jaggi

The scale of modern datasets necessitates the development of efficient distributed optimization methods for machine learning. We present a general-purpose framework for distributed computing environments, CoCoA, that has an efficient communication scheme and is applicable to a wide variety of problems in machine learning and signal processing. We extend the framework to cover general non-strongly-convex regularizers, including L1-regularized problems like lasso, sparse logistic regression, and elastic net regularization, and show how earlier work can be derived as a special case. We provide convergence guarantees for the class of convex regularized loss minimization objectives, leveraging a novel approach in handling non-strongly-convex regularizers and non-smooth loss functions. The resulting framework has markedly improved performance over state-of-the-art methods, as we illustrate with an extensive set of experiments on real distributed datasets.

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epfml/cola mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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BIG-bench Machine LearningDistributed ComputingDistributed Optimization

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