Decentralize and Randomize: Faster Algorithm for Wasserstein Barycenters
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We study the problem of decentralized distributed computation of a discrete approximation for regularized Wasserstein barycenter of a finite set of continuous probability measures distributedly stored over a network. Particularly, we assume that there is a network of agents/machines/computers where each agent holds a private continuous probability measure, and seeks to compute the barycenter of all the measures in the network by getting samples from its local measure and exchanging information with its neighbors. Motivated by this problem, we develop and theoretically analyze a novel accelerated primal-dual stochastic gradient method for general stochastic convex optimization problems with linear equality constraints. Then, we apply this method to the decentralized distributed optimization setting to propose a new algorithm for the distributed semi-discrete regularized Wasserstein barycenter problem. The proposed algorithm can be executed over arbitrary networks that are undirected, connected and static, using the local information only. Moreover, we show explicit non-asymptotic complexity in terms of the problem parameters. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our method on the distributed computation of the regularized Wasserstein barycenter of univariate Gaussian and von Mises distributions, as well as on some applications to image aggregation.
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