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Better Bounds for the Distributed Experts Problem

arXiv cs.LG / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses the distributed experts problem involving multiple experts distributed across several servers over multiple timesteps, focusing on minimizing regret while optimizing communication overhead.
  • It introduces a new protocol that achieves improved regret bounds roughly proportional to 1 over the square root of time and polylogarithmic factors involving the number of experts, servers, and timesteps.
  • The communication cost of the proposed protocol is significantly reduced compared to prior work, scaling based on the number of experts, servers, and a term depending on the loss norm parameter p.
  • This advancement provides a more efficient solution for distributed learning or decision-making systems where communication cost is a critical constraint.
  • The paper's improvement contributes to theoretical understanding and practical algorithms in distributed machine learning and optimization contexts.

Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.09168 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:Better Bounds for the Distributed Experts Problem

View a PDF of the paper titled Better Bounds for the Distributed Experts Problem, by David P. Woodruff and 1 other authors
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Abstract:In this paper, we study the distributed experts problem, where $n$ experts are distributed across $s$ servers for $T$ timesteps. The loss of each expert at each time $t$ is the $\ell_p$ norm of the vector that consists of the losses of the expert at each of the $s$ servers at time $t$. The goal is to minimize the regret $R$, i.e., the loss of the distributed protocol compared to the loss of the best expert, amortized over the all $T$ times, while using the minimum amount of communication. We give a protocol that achieves regret roughly $R\gtrsim\frac{1}{\sqrt{T}\cdot\text{poly}\log(nsT)}$, using $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{n}{R^2}+\frac{s}{R^2}\right)\cdot\max(s^{1-2/p},1)\cdot\text{poly}\log(nsT)$ bits of communication, which improves on previous work.
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS); Machine Learning (stat.ML)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09168 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2603.09168v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09168
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Samson Zhou [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:17:34 UTC (158 KB)
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