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Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_5
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper relates classic results from parallel
linear system solvers and linear dynamical systems to the analysis of
parallel Gibbs sampling using a Hogwild update strategy which violates the
Markov blanket independence assumptions. By relating the Hogwild Gaussian
Gibbs sampler to these classic results the authors are able to make strong
statements about the structure of the posterior distribution both in terms
of its stability as well as the resulting mean and covariance.
The
paper is dense but well written.
What I like most about this paper
is how it really emphasizes the connection between parallel Gibbs sampling
and the classic Gauss-Seidel and Jacobi linear solvers and how this
connection can lead to new insight. I believe this connection and the
splitting strategy could be useful in the broader design and analysis of
parallel algorithm in ML.
Minor comments:
After the
proof of Theorem 1 there is some discussion suggesting that the Hogwild
Gibbs sampler would perform best in tree structured models (or diagonally
dominant models). However, in these models wouldn't an ergodic parallel
sampling strategy perform well (e.g., the Chromatic Gibbs Sampler since
trees are two colorable).
Labeling and directly referencing the
subparts of figure 1a would help a lot since the splitting can be a bit
confusing.
Q2: Please summarize your review in
1-2 sentences
This well written paper connects parallel Gibbs
sampling with classic results in linear systems solvers and linear
dynamical systems and uses these connections to analyze the Hogwild Gibbs
sampler when applied to Gaussian graphical models. These connections could
have a significant impact in how we design and analyze parallel Gibbs
samplers. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_7
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The authors perform an analysis of "Hogwild" parallel
Gibbs sampling for Gaussian distributions and show a connection between
Gauss-Seidel / Jacobi and the Hogwild routine. They exploit this
connection to show conditions for when this parallel Gibbs sampling
process converges to the correct mean, and they are also able to make
statements about the covariances of the system.
I enjoyed reading
the connection between Gauss-Seidel and Gauss-Jacobi and parallel Gaussian
Gibbs sampling and find that this type of analysis is very useful for the
NIPS community as parallel Gibbs sampling has received relatively little
theoretical attention. A few comments:
1) I guess for the simple
case of Gaussians, parallel Gibbs sampling is overkill as one can just
directly obtain samples quickly for any multivariate Gaussian (but of
course it is useful for analysis purposes). It would be nice to point this
out (not sure if I agree with the sentiment in line 69) and also to make a
few statements about how this analysis could also be applied to
non-Gaussian cases.
2) I have a technical question about the role
of the v vector (samples from the Normal). It seems that for a given
iteration t, the same set of v samples would have to be globally shared
across all processors for this method to work (e.g., Eq. 4)? In other
words, does processor 2 have to know the exact v samples that processor 1
used in order for this Jacobi process to work? If that is the case, then
parallel sampling is not really parallel but predetermined in advance
based on the global v vector. I would appreciate it if the authors could
clarify this issue.
3) It would be nice to have more intuitive
explanations after some of the equations (e.g., after proposition 5).
4) Figure 1(b) was somewhat surprising as intuitively it seems the
processors would locally drift more when q=infinity which would hurt the
global model more. It might be worth taking a look at the dissertation of
Asuncion (on of the co-authors of AD-LDA) who analyzed the Markov chain
transition matrix of AD-LDA for a simple case and found that the
stationary distribution of AD-LDA got worse when local processors were
allowed to fully converge. Q2: Please summarize your
review in 1-2 sentences
The authors perform an analysis of "Hogwild" parallel
Gibbs sampling for Gaussian distributions and show a connection between
Gauss-Seidel / Jacobi and the Hogwild routine. They exploit this
connection to show conditions for when this parallel Gibbs sampling
process converges to the correct mean, and they are also able to make
statements about the covariances of the system. I enjoyed reading the
connection between Gauss-Seidel and Gauss-Jacobi and parallel Gaussian
Gibbs sampling and find that this type of analysis is very useful for the
NIPS community as parallel Gibbs sampling has received relatively little
theoretical attention. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_8
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The authors present analysis of "hogwild" parallel
Gibbs sampling, where Gibbs updates are run for blocks of variables
separately on each processor without communicating each iteration, so that
the sampler is no longer "correct" at least in the traditional sense. The
analysis focuses on sampling Gaussian graphical models, with the main
result being that under a condition on the precision matrix (being
generalised diagonally dominant) hogwild Gaussian Gibbs sampling is
stable, and gives the correct asympoptic mean. The story for variances is
a little more complex: a finite error is introduced when there are cross
processor interactions that are ignored, and these become more important
if the mixing at each processor is faster, but in the limit of drawing
exact samples at each processor the variance can be corrected
analytically.
Quality. The ideas and analysis are novel and
rigorous as far as I can tell.
Clarity. The paper is reasonably
well written but could be better organised, especially for the typically
ML reader who is probably not overly familar with the linear algebra terms
or the various linear solvers introduced. Having a "background material"
section first laying this groundwork might be helpful.
Originality. I am not aware of other analysis of this type of
sampling.
Significance. Scaling sampling methods is of significant
interest to the NIPS community, so analysis of methods that attempt to do
this is valuable, especially if it points the way towards algorithmic
improvements. This paper laid out some nice ideas, many of which seem
intuitive: hogwild sampling is dependent on the cross processor
interactions not being too strong, and faster local mixing might actually
be detrimental in some ways. However, the connection of these ideas to
potential algorithm improvements was only hypothetical and then only
hinted at. The paper begs the question in several cases. The generalised
diagonally dominant condition in practice means I should try to put highly
interacted variables: how should I try to do this? How well does it work
in practice? Proposition 5 gives an analytic correct for the variance when
q=inf: what happens if I use this for q large? I think this would have
been a stronger paper if these questions had been addressed: if not
empirically, at least in the discussion. But I accept there is a space
limitation.
A relevant reference that also used "hogwild" sampling
is Finale Doshi-Velez, Shakir Mohamed, David A. Knowles and Zoubin
Ghahramani. Large scale nonparametric Bayesian inference: Data
parallelisation in the Indian buffet process. NIPS 2009.
Minor
notes Equation 1: am I missing something or there should be a minus
sign?! Next equation (line 141): hat over v
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
A nice piece of analysis that could have been more
clearly laid out for the non-expert, and would have benefitted from more
discussion (or experiments) about the practical implications.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
# Overview #
We thank the reviewers for their
thoughtful comments and suggestions.
As we understand the reviews,
the reviewers agreed that the work is interesting, original, and
potentially impactful. The main criticisms were that the paper is dense
and that it could comment on a few more points or in greater detail. Given
the page limit there is a degree of tension between these two objectives,
but we can make some revisions to clarify points in the paper and respond
in greater detail here.
# Assigned_Reviewer_5 #
Indeed,
tree models can be sampled exactly with message passing in time linear in
the number of nodes. However, our point is that generalized diagonally
dominant models include as special cases both tree models and *latent*
tree models. Latent tree models may in fact be fully connected; there need
only exist some (unknown) set of extra latent variables that could be
introduced to yield a tree. Latent tree models are used to model
multiresolution or hierarchical long-range effects and they are of
independent interest, so we point out that they are included in the class
of models for which we prove Gaussian Hogwild Gibbs sampling is
convergent. This result also suggests that these samplers may be effective
more generally for many models which have multiresolution or hierarchical
structure.
# Assigned_Reviewer_7 #
The Gaussian case is
certainly interesting for analysis of machine learning methods, but
Gaussian sampling and inference algorithms are an active area of research
both in machine learning and in other areas. Drawing exact samples with a
direct method (such as a Cholesky decomposition) has cubic complexity in
the number of variables, and for large models, such as in Gaussian Process
models or large Markov random fields, cubic complexity can be too
expensive.
To emphasize that Gaussian sampling and other inference
methods are of interest not only as an analytical tool but also as a
practical one, we will add appropriate references, such as
"Efficient sampling for Gaussian process inference using control
variables" in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 2008.
By construction, the Hogwild Gibbs sampling algorithm does not
communicate the local samples during the inner loop, and that is reflected
in Eq. 4 by the fact that v^{(j,t)} is diagonally-shaped noise, i.e. it is
a collection of independent scalar Gaussians. Further, note that because B
and C are block diagonal matrices, the only place where block entries of
the state vector x^{(t)} affect one another is when A is applied, which
happens once per outer iteration when the statistics are synchronized.
We thank the reviewer for the reference, and we think there
may be an interesting connection to be made at some level: as we show in
our first-order analysis in Section 4.2.1 and in the simulation in Figure
1(d), when processors are allowed to fully mix the cross-processor
variances estimates are made worse (while means remain correct).
#
Assigned_Reviewer_8 #
We agree that there are many more questions
to ask and perhaps answer with our proposed framework, but given space
constraints and that the paper is already agreed to be dense, we did our
best to lay out both the framework and the results for which we did have
room concerning convergence, correctness of means, and errors (with
tradeoffs) and corrections in variances.
The question of how
best to organize the variables is very important for practical
considerations, as the reviewer points out. Exploring several methods with
empirical comparisons, as the reviewer suggests, and perhaps analysis
using some of the tools we develop here may require its own paper.
Our framework does provide a way to analyze the error when
applying the asymptotic correction given that local samplers have not
fully mixed, though we do not have space to include such an analysis in
this paper. As a brief sketch, the local process covariance on the kth
processor converges (in any submultiplicative matrix norm, such as
Frobenius norm) to its asymptotic value at a rate of rho(B_k^{-1} C_k)^2
per inner iteration. Further, from the linear dynamical system analysis in
the paper it is clear that to analyze the effect of any error in the local
covariances on the estimated overall covariance, one needs only to analyze
the perturbation of a linear system (the outer iterations' discrete time
Lyapunov system) and the scaling by the linear correction factor. There
are many relevant results on bounding errors for such discrete-time
Lyapunov systems in "Sensitivity of the solutions of some matrix
equations" by Rajendra Bhatia and Ludwig Elsner (1997). Qualitatively, our
framework shows that if the local covariance error (which decreases at
least as fast as rho(B^-1 C)^(2q) with q) is small, the error in the
corrected covariance estimates is also small.
We do not believe
this paper has room for an appropriate treatment of this issue, though we
hope we have demonstrated here that it is readily approachable with the
framework.
There is indeed a missing minus sign in Eq. 1; it
was a typesetting mistake and does not affect any other expressions in the
paper.
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