Periodic Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum for Decentralized Training

Abstract: Decentralized training has been actively studied in recent years. Although a wide variety of methods have been proposed, yet the decentralized momentum SGD method is still underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel periodic decentralized momentum SGD method, which employs the momentum schema and periodic communication for decentralized training. With these two strategies, as well as the topology of the decentralized training system, the theoretical convergence analysis of our proposed method is difficult. We address this challenging problem and provide the condition under which our proposed method can achieve the linear speedup regarding the number of workers. Furthermore, we also introduce a communication-efficient variant to reduce the communication cost in each communication round. The condition for achieving the linear speedup is also provided for this variant. To the best of our knowledge, these two methods are all the first ones achieving these theoretical results in their corresponding domain. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the performance of our proposed two methods, and both of them have shown superior performance over existing methods.