Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2025 (ICLR 2025) Conference
Michael Crawshaw, Blake Woodworth, Mingrui Liu
We analyze two variants of Local Gradient Descent applied to distributed logistic regression with heterogeneous, separable data and show convergence at the rate $O(1/KR)$ for $K$ local steps and sufficiently large $R$ communication rounds. In contrast, all existing convergence guarantees for Local GD applied to any problem are at least $\Omega(1/R)$, meaning they fail to show the benefit of local updates. The key to our improved guarantee is showing progress on the logistic regression objective when using a large stepsize $\eta \gg 1/K$, whereas prior analysis depends on $\eta \leq 1/K$.