DES-LOC: Desynced Low Communication Adaptive Optimizers for Training Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Iacob, Alex, Sani, Lorenzo, Safaryan, Mher, Giampouras, Paris, Horváth, Samuel, Jovanovic, Andrej, Kurmanji, Meghdad, Aleksandrov, Preslav, Shen, William F., Qiu, Xinchi, Lane, Nicholas D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Iacob, Alex
Sani, Lorenzo
Safaryan, Mher
Giampouras, Paris
Horváth, Samuel
Jovanovic, Andrej
Kurmanji, Meghdad
Aleksandrov, Preslav
Shen, William F.
Qiu, Xinchi
Lane, Nicholas D.
author_facet Iacob, Alex
Sani, Lorenzo
Safaryan, Mher
Giampouras, Paris
Horváth, Samuel
Jovanovic, Andrej
Kurmanji, Meghdad
Aleksandrov, Preslav
Shen, William F.
Qiu, Xinchi
Lane, Nicholas D.
contents Scaling foundation model training with Distributed Data Parallel (DDP) methods is bandwidth-limited. Existing infrequent communication methods like Local SGD were designed to synchronize only model parameters and cannot be trivially applied to adaptive optimizers due to additional optimizer states. Current approaches extending Local SGD either lack convergence guarantees or require synchronizing all optimizer states, tripling communication costs. We propose Desynced Low Communication Adaptive Optimizers (DES-LOC), a family of optimizers assigning independent synchronization periods to parameters and momenta, enabling lower communication costs while preserving convergence. Through extensive experiments on language models of up to 1.7B, we show that DES-LOC can communicate 170x less than DDP and 2x less than the previous state-of-the-art Local ADAM. Furthermore, unlike previous heuristic approaches, DES-LOC is suited for practical training scenarios prone to system failures. DES-LOC offers a scalable, bandwidth-efficient, and fault-tolerant solution for foundation model training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22549
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DES-LOC: Desynced Low Communication Adaptive Optimizers for Training Foundation Models
Iacob, Alex
Sani, Lorenzo
Safaryan, Mher
Giampouras, Paris
Horváth, Samuel
Jovanovic, Andrej
Kurmanji, Meghdad
Aleksandrov, Preslav
Shen, William F.
Qiu, Xinchi
Lane, Nicholas D.
Machine Learning
Scaling foundation model training with Distributed Data Parallel (DDP) methods is bandwidth-limited. Existing infrequent communication methods like Local SGD were designed to synchronize only model parameters and cannot be trivially applied to adaptive optimizers due to additional optimizer states. Current approaches extending Local SGD either lack convergence guarantees or require synchronizing all optimizer states, tripling communication costs. We propose Desynced Low Communication Adaptive Optimizers (DES-LOC), a family of optimizers assigning independent synchronization periods to parameters and momenta, enabling lower communication costs while preserving convergence. Through extensive experiments on language models of up to 1.7B, we show that DES-LOC can communicate 170x less than DDP and 2x less than the previous state-of-the-art Local ADAM. Furthermore, unlike previous heuristic approaches, DES-LOC is suited for practical training scenarios prone to system failures. DES-LOC offers a scalable, bandwidth-efficient, and fault-tolerant solution for foundation model training.
title DES-LOC: Desynced Low Communication Adaptive Optimizers for Training Foundation Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22549