With the recent proliferation of large-scale learning problems,there have
been a lot of interest on distributed machine learning algorithms, particularly
those that are based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants.
However, existing algorithms either suffer from slow convergence due to the
inherent variance of stochastic gradients, or have a fast linear convergence
rate but at the expense of poorer solution quality. In this paper, we combine
their merits by proposing a fast distributed asynchronous SGD-based algorithm
with variance reduction. A constant learning rate can be used, and it is also
guaranteed to converge linearly to the optimal solution. Experiments on the
Google Cloud Computing Platform demonstrate that the proposed algorithm
outperforms state-of-the-art distributed asynchronous algorithms in terms of
both wall clock time and solution quality.

本文提出了一种基于异步随机梯度下降的快速分布式机器学习算法，采用变量规约技术，可使用常量的学习率，并保证线性收敛到最优解，在 Google 云计算平台上的实验表明，该算法在墙时钟时间和解的质量方面优于最先进的分布式异步算法。