Labeled data often comes at a high cost as it may require recruiting human labelers or running costly' experiments. At the same time, in many practical scenarios, one already has access to a partially labeled, potentially biased dataset that can help with the learning task at hand. Motivated by such settings, we formally initiate a study of semi-supervised active learning through the frame of linear regression.

We consider the problem where nclients transmit d-dimensional real-valued vectors using dp1 `op1qqbits each, in a manner that allows the receiver to approximately reconstruct their mean. Such compression problems naturally arise in distributed and federated learning. We provide novel mathematical results and derive computationally efficient algorithms that are more accurate than previous compression techniques. We evaluate our methods on a collection of distributed and federated learning tasks, using a variety of datasets, and show a consistent improvement over the state of the art.

It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find -stationary points (with gradient norm less than) in O(1/ 2) iterations. However, many important nonconvex optimization problems, such as those associated with training modern neural networks, are inherently not smooth, making these results inapplicable. In this paper, we study nonsmooth nonconvex optimization from an oracle complexity viewpoint, where the algorithm is assumed to be given access only to local information about the function at various points. We provide two main results (under mild assumptions): First, we consider the problem of getting near -stationary points. This is perhaps the most natural relaxation of finding -stationary points, which is impossible in the nonsmooth nonconvex case. We prove that this relaxed goal cannot be achieved efficiently, for any distance and smaller than some constants. Our second result deals with the possibility of tackling nonsmooth nonconvex optimization by reduction to smooth optimization: Namely, applying smooth optimization methods on a smooth approximation of the objective function. For this approach, we prove an inherent trade-off between oracle complexity and smoothness: On the one hand, smoothing a nonsmooth nonconvex function can be done very efficiently (e.g., by randomized smoothing), but with dimension-dependent factors in the smoothness parameter, which can strongly affect iteration complexity when plugging into standard smooth optimization methods. On the other hand, these dimension factors can be eliminated with suitable smoothing methods, but only by making the oracle complexity of the smoothing process exponentially large.