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Tongtian Zhu

7 accepted papers

2026

On The Surprising Effectiveness of a Single Global Merging in Decentralized Learning

ICLR 2026oral

Decentralized learning provides a scalable alternative to parameter-server-based training, yet its performance is often hindered by limited peer-to-peer communication. In this paper, we study how communication should be scheduled over time to improve global generalization, including determining whe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

SemanticMask: A Contrastive View Design for Anomaly Detection in Tabular Data

IJCAI 2024poster

Contrastive learning based on data augmentation techniques has recently achieved substantial advancement in learning a representation well-suited for anomaly detection in image domain. However, due to the lack of spatial structure, designing effective data augmentation methods for tabular data remai…

2023

Contrastive Identity-Aware Learning for Multi-Agent Value Decomposition

AAAI 2023technical

Value Decomposition (VD) aims to deduce the contributions of agents for decentralized policies in the presence of only global rewards, and has recently emerged as a powerful credit assignment paradigm for tackling cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems. One of the main challe…

2023

Decentralized SGD and Average-direction SAM are Asymptotically Equivalent

ICML 2023poster

Decentralized stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD) allows collaborative learning on massive devices simultaneously without the control of a central server. However, existing theories claim that decentralization invariably undermines generalization. In this paper, we challenge the conventional belief…

2023

Lookaround Optimizer: $k$ steps around, 1 step average

NeurIPS 2023poster

Weight Average (WA) is an active research topic due to its simplicity in ensembling deep networks and the effectiveness in promoting generalization. Existing weight average approaches, however, are often carried out along only one training trajectory in a post-hoc manner (i.e., the weights are avera…

2022

Topology-aware Generalization of Decentralized SGD

ICML 2022spotlight

This paper studies the algorithmic stability and generalizability of decentralized stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD). We prove that the consensus model learned by D-SGD is $\mathcal{O}{(m/N\unaryplus1/m\unaryplus\lambda^2)}$-stable in expectation in the non-convex non-smooth setting, where $N$ is…