Provably Convergent Decentralized Optimization over Directed Graphs under Generalized Smoothness

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Bo, Yanan, Wang, Yongqiang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Bo, Yanan
Wang, Yongqiang
author_facet Bo, Yanan
Wang, Yongqiang
contents Decentralized optimization has become a fundamental tool for large-scale learning systems; however, most existing methods rely on the classical Lipschitz smoothness assumption, which is often violated in problems with rapidly varying gradients. Motivated by this limitation, we study decentralized optimization under the generalized $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness framework, in which the Hessian norm is allowed to grow linearly with the gradient norm, thereby accommodating rapidly varying gradients beyond classical Lipschitz smoothness. We integrate gradient-tracking techniques with gradient clipping and carefully design the clipping threshold to ensure accurate convergence over directed communication graphs under generalized smoothness. In contrast to existing distributed optimization results under generalized smoothness that require a bounded gradient dissimilarity assumption, our results remain valid even when the gradient dissimilarity is unbounded, making the proposed framework more applicable to realistic heterogeneous data environments. We validate our approach via numerical experiments on standard benchmark datasets, including LIBSVM and CIFAR-10, using regularized logistic regression and convolutional neural networks, demonstrating superior stability and faster convergence over existing methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_03566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Provably Convergent Decentralized Optimization over Directed Graphs under Generalized Smoothness
Bo, Yanan
Wang, Yongqiang
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
Decentralized optimization has become a fundamental tool for large-scale learning systems; however, most existing methods rely on the classical Lipschitz smoothness assumption, which is often violated in problems with rapidly varying gradients. Motivated by this limitation, we study decentralized optimization under the generalized $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness framework, in which the Hessian norm is allowed to grow linearly with the gradient norm, thereby accommodating rapidly varying gradients beyond classical Lipschitz smoothness. We integrate gradient-tracking techniques with gradient clipping and carefully design the clipping threshold to ensure accurate convergence over directed communication graphs under generalized smoothness. In contrast to existing distributed optimization results under generalized smoothness that require a bounded gradient dissimilarity assumption, our results remain valid even when the gradient dissimilarity is unbounded, making the proposed framework more applicable to realistic heterogeneous data environments. We validate our approach via numerical experiments on standard benchmark datasets, including LIBSVM and CIFAR-10, using regularized logistic regression and convolutional neural networks, demonstrating superior stability and faster convergence over existing methods.
title Provably Convergent Decentralized Optimization over Directed Graphs under Generalized Smoothness
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03566