Distributed large neural network with centralized equivalence

Xinyue Liang, Alireza M Javid, Mikael Skoglund, Saikat Chatterjee

Abstract: In this article, we develop a distributed algorithm for learning a large neural network that is deep and wide. We consider a scenario where the training dataset is not available in a single processing node, but distributed among several nodes. We show that a recently proposed large neural network architecture called progressive learning network (PLN) can be trained in a distributed setup with centralized equivalence. That means we would get the same result if the data be available in a single node. Using a distributed convex optimization method called alternating-direction-method-of-multipliers (ADMM), we perform training of PLN in the distributed setup.