Asynchronous Stochastic Subgradient Methods for General Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization

Asynchronous distributed methods are a popular way to reduce the communication and synchronization costs of large-scale optimization. Yet, for all their success, little is known about their convergence guarantees in the challenging case of general non-smooth, non-convex objectives, beyond cases where closed-form proximal operator solutions are available. This is all the more surprising since these … Read more