Distributed Saddle-Point Problems Under Data Similarity

Abstract

We study solution methods for (strongly-)convex-(strongly)-concave Saddle-Point Problems (SPPs) over networks of two type--master/workers (thus centralized) architectures and mesh (thus decentralized) networks. The local functions at each node are assumed to be \textit{similar}, due to statistical data similarity or otherwise. We establish lower complexity bounds for a fairly general class of algorithms solving the SPP. We show that a given suboptimality $\epsilon>0$ is achieved over master/workers networks in $\Omega\big(\Delta\cdot \delta/\mu\cdot \log (1/\varepsilon)\big)$ rounds of communications, where $\delta>0$ measures the degree of similarity of the local functions, $\mu$ is their strong convexity constant, and $\Delta$ is the diameter of the network. The lower communication complexity bound over mesh networks reads $\Omega\big(1/{\sqrt{\rho}} \cdot {\delta}/{\mu}\cdot\log (1/\varepsilon)\big)$, where $\rho$ is the (normalized) eigengap of the gossip matrix used for the communication between neighbouring nodes. We then propose algorithms matching the lower bounds over either types of networks (up to log-factors). We assess the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on a robust regression problem.