Abstract

We study parallel and distributed Frank-Wolfe algorithms; the former on shared memory machines with mini-batching, and the latter in a delayed update framework. In both cases, we perform computations asynchronously whenever possible. We assume block-separable constraints as in Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe (BCFW) method (Lacoste-Julien et al., 2013), but our analysis subsumes BCFW and reveals problemdependent quantities that govern the speedups of our methods over BCFW. A notable feature of our algorithms is that they do not depend on worst-case bounded delays, but only (mildly) on expected delays, making them robust to stragglers and faulty worker threads. We present experiments on structural SVM and Group Fused Lasso, and observe significant speedups over competing state-of-the-art (and synchronous) methods.