In recent centralized nonconvex distributed learning and federated learning, local methods are one of the promising approaches to reduce communication time. However, existing work has mainly focused on studying first-order optimality guarantees. On the other side, second-order optimality guaranteed algorithms, i.e., algorithms escaping saddle points, have been extensively studied in the nondistributed optimization literature. In this paper, we study a new local algorithm called Bias-Variance Reduced Local Perturbed SGD (BVR-L-PSGD), that combines the existing bias-variance reduced gradient estimator with parameter perturbation to find second-order optimal points in centralized nonconvex distributed optimization. BVR-L-PSGD enjoys second-order optimality with nearly the same communication complexity as the best known one of BVR-L-SGD to find first-order optimality. Particularly, the communication complexity is better than non-local methods when the local datasets heterogeneity is smaller than the smoothness of the local loss. In an extreme case, the communication complexity approaches to eΘ(1)when the local datasets heterogeneity goes to zero.

AAdditional Experiments620 Task 1 - Grouping In addition to grouping clue words using token embeddings (discussed in621 the main paper 4), we also ran grouping the words by clustering on'contextual' embeddings. We622 experimentally induce'context' by joining the sixteen (16) word tokens (in a random order) into a623 single pseudo-sentence. The embeddings for each token were different based on the ordering of the624 tokens. We repeat the random ordering sixteen times and report the mean and variance of the results625 obtained in Table 6.626 Mean standard deviation over 16 random seeds is shown. Task 2 - Connections In addition to prompting based results on GPT-4 (discussed in 4), we ran627 experiments on additional LLMs like LLaMa [67] (7B, 13B) using pre-trained configuration weights628 obtained by permission from Meta AI. However, without additional fine-tuning on the specific task,629 these LLMs were unable to solve the task in a meaningful manner.