Escaping Saddle Points in Distributed Newton's Method with Communication efficiency and Byzantine Resilience

We study the problem of optimizing a non-convex loss function (with saddle points) in a distributed framework in the presence of Byzantine machines. We consider a standard distributed setting with one central machine (parameter server) communicating with many worker machines. Our proposed algorithm is a variant of the celebrated cubic-regularized Newton method of Nesterov and Polyak \cite{nest}, which avoids saddle points efficiently and converges to local minima. Furthermore, our algorithm resists the presence of Byzantine machines, which may create \emph{fake local minima} near the saddle points of the loss function, also known as saddle-point attack. We robustify the cubic-regularized Newton algorithm such that it avoids the saddle points and the fake local minimas efficiently. Furthermore, being a second order algorithm, the iteration complexity is much lower than its first order counterparts, and thus our algorithm communicates little with the parameter server. We obtain theoretical guarantees for our proposed scheme under several settings including approximate (sub-sampled) gradients and Hessians. Moreover, we validate our theoretical findings with experiments using standard datasets and several types of Byzantine attacks.