Efficient Unbiased Sparsification

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Barnes, Leighton, Cameron, Stephen, Chow, Timothy, Cohen, Emma, Frankston, Keith, Howard, Benjamin, Kochman, Fred, Scheinerman, Daniel, VanderKam, Jeffrey
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Barnes, Leighton
Cameron, Stephen
Chow, Timothy
Cohen, Emma
Frankston, Keith
Howard, Benjamin
Kochman, Fred
Scheinerman, Daniel
VanderKam, Jeffrey
author_facet Barnes, Leighton
Cameron, Stephen
Chow, Timothy
Cohen, Emma
Frankston, Keith
Howard, Benjamin
Kochman, Fred
Scheinerman, Daniel
VanderKam, Jeffrey
contents An unbiased $m$-sparsification of a vector $p\in \mathbb{R}^n$ is a random vector $Q\in \mathbb{R}^n$ with mean $p$ that has at most $m<n$ nonzero coordinates. Unbiased sparsification compresses the original vector without introducing bias; it arises in various contexts, such as in federated learning and sampling sparse probability distributions. Ideally, unbiased sparsification should also minimize the expected value of a divergence function $\mathsf{Div}(Q,p)$ that measures how far away $Q$ is from the original $p$. If $Q$ is optimal in this sense, then we call it efficient. Our main results describe efficient unbiased sparsifications for divergences that are either permutation-invariant or additively separable. Surprisingly, the characterization for permutation-invariant divergences is robust to the choice of divergence function, in the sense that our class of optimal $Q$ for squared Euclidean distance coincides with our class of optimal $Q$ for Kullback-Leibler divergence, or indeed any of a wide variety of divergences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_14925
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Unbiased Sparsification
Barnes, Leighton
Cameron, Stephen
Chow, Timothy
Cohen, Emma
Frankston, Keith
Howard, Benjamin
Kochman, Fred
Scheinerman, Daniel
VanderKam, Jeffrey
Information Theory
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
An unbiased $m$-sparsification of a vector $p\in \mathbb{R}^n$ is a random vector $Q\in \mathbb{R}^n$ with mean $p$ that has at most $m<n$ nonzero coordinates. Unbiased sparsification compresses the original vector without introducing bias; it arises in various contexts, such as in federated learning and sampling sparse probability distributions. Ideally, unbiased sparsification should also minimize the expected value of a divergence function $\mathsf{Div}(Q,p)$ that measures how far away $Q$ is from the original $p$. If $Q$ is optimal in this sense, then we call it efficient. Our main results describe efficient unbiased sparsifications for divergences that are either permutation-invariant or additively separable. Surprisingly, the characterization for permutation-invariant divergences is robust to the choice of divergence function, in the sense that our class of optimal $Q$ for squared Euclidean distance coincides with our class of optimal $Q$ for Kullback-Leibler divergence, or indeed any of a wide variety of divergences.
title Efficient Unbiased Sparsification
topic Information Theory
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14925