README.md

Sparsified SGD with Memory

Code for the experimental part of the paper Sparsified SGD with Memory. It contains the code for the following experiments:

• Theoretical convergence with different sparsification operator
• Comparison with QSGD
• Multi-core experiments

Use notebooks/plots.ipynb to visualize the results.

Please open an issue if you have questions or problems.

Reproduce the results

To reproduce the results, you can download the datasets from LibSVM

mkdir data
cd data/
wget https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvmtools/datasets/binary/rcv1_test.binary.bz2
wget https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvmtools/datasets/binary/epsilon_normalized.bz2

We decompress the libsvm file and use pickle format instead. It takes more space but is faster to load. You can create a file as follow

import pickle
import os
from sklearn.datasets import load_svmlight_file

if not os.path.exists('data'):
    os.makedirs('data')

X, y = load_svmlight_file('data/rcv1_test.binary.bz2')
with open('rcv1.pickle', 'wb') as f:
    pickle.dump((X, y), f)
   
X, y = load_svmlight_file('data/epsilon_normalized.bz2')
with open('epsilon.pickle', 'wb') as f:
    pickle.dump((X, y), f)

You can run the baseline

python3 experiments/baselines.py ./data results/baselines

and then run our experiments, for example

python3 experiments/rcv1-th.py ./data results/rcv1-th

Reference

If you use this code, please cite the following paper

@inproceedings{scj2018sparseSGD,
   author = {Sebastian U. Stich, Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier and Martin Jaggi},
   title = "{Sparsified SGD with Memory}",
   booktitle = {NIPS 2018 - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
   year = 2018,
}