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Biased Compression in Gradient Coding for Distributed Learning

delete2026-01-21
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PRE
AI
C
Chengxi Li
M
Ming Xiao
M
Mikael Skoglund
DOI:10.1109/TSP.2026.3656662delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Communication bottlenecks and the presence of stragglers pose significant challenges in distributed learning (DL). To deal with these challenges, recent advances leverage unbiased compression functions and gradient coding. However, the significant benefits of biased compression remain largely unexplored. To close this gap, we propose <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Co</b>mpressed Gradient <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Co</b>ding with <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">E</b>rror <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">F</b>eedback (COCO-EF), a novel DL method that combines gradient coding with biased compression to mitigate straggler effects and reduce communication costs. In each iteration, non-straggler devices encode local gradients from redundantly allocated training data, incorporate prior compression errors, and compress the results using biased compression functions before transmission. The server aggregates these compressed messages from the non-stragglers to approximate the global gradient for model updates. We provide rigorous theoretical convergence guarantees for COCO-EF and validate its superior learning performance over baseline methods through empirical evaluations. As far as we know, we are among the first to rigorously demonstrate that biased compression has substantial benefits in DL, when gradient coding is employed to cope with stragglers.
Keywords:
Compression
distributed learning
gradient coding
convergence analysis

Journal

I
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
IF:
5.8
Papers:
276
Citations:
0

Organization

K
kth royal institute of technology
Scholars:
761
Papers: 425
Citations: 0