Scaling Up Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent

Kenneth Tran, Saghar Hosseini, Lin Xiao, Thomas Finley, Mikhail Bilenko

Abstract: Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (SDCA) has recently emerged as a state-of-the-art method for solving large-scale supervised learning problems formulated as minimization of convex loss functions. It performs iterative, random-coordinate updates to maximize the dual objective. Due to the sequential nature of the iterations, it is typically implemented as a single-threaded algorithm limited to in-memory datasets. In this paper, we introduce an asynchronous parallel version of the algorithm, analyze its convergence properties, and propose a solution for primal-dual synchronization required to achieve convergence in practice. In addition, we describe a method for scaling the algorithm to out-of-memory datasets via multi-threaded deserialization of block-compressed data. This approach yields sufficient pseudo-randomness to provide the same convergence rate as random-order in-memory access. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed methods and their ability to fully utilize computational resources and scale to out-of-memory datasets.