Echo-CGC: A Communication-Efficient Byzantine-tolerant Distributed Machine Learning Algorithm in Single-Hop Radio Network

TL;DR

Echo-CGC is a novel distributed machine learning algorithm that leverages broadcast properties of single-hop radio networks to significantly reduce communication overhead while tolerating Byzantine faults.

Contribution

It introduces a gradient descent-based method utilizing echo messages to minimize data transmission in Byzantine-tolerant distributed learning over radio networks.

Findings

Reduces communication by up to 80% with many nodes

Utilizes overhearing in radio networks to avoid transmitting full gradients

Achieves Byzantine tolerance in a communication-efficient manner

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on a popular DML framework -- the parameter server computation paradigm and iterative learning algorithms that proceed in rounds. We aim to reduce the communication complexity of Byzantine-tolerant DML algorithms in the single-hop radio network. Inspired by the CGC filter developed by Gupta and Vaidya, PODC 2020, we propose a gradient descent-based algorithm, Echo-CGC. Our main novelty is a mechanism to utilize the broadcast properties of the radio network to avoid transmitting the raw gradients (full $d$-dimensional vectors). In the radio network, each worker is able to overhear previous gradients that were transmitted to the parameter server. Roughly speaking, in Echo-CGC, if a worker "agrees" with a combination of prior gradients, it will broadcast the "echo message" instead of the its raw local gradient. The echo message contains a vector of coefficients (of size at most $n$) and the ratio of the magnitude between two gradients (a float). In comparison, the traditional approaches need to send $n$ local gradients in each round, where each gradient is typically a vector in an ultra-high dimensional space ($d\gg n$). The improvement on communication complexity of our algorithm depends on multiple factors, including number of nodes, number of faulty workers in an execution, and the cost function. We numerically analyze the improvement, and show that with a large number of nodes, Echo-CGC reduces $80\%$ of the communication under standard assumptions.