Communication-Efficient Distributed Deep Metric Learning with Hybrid Synchronization

Deep metric learning is widely used in extreme classification and image retrieval because of its powerful ability to learn the semantic low-dimensional embedding of high-dimensional data. However, the heavy computational cost of mining valuable pair or triplet of training data and updating models frequently in existing deep metric learning approaches becomes a barrier to apply such methods to a large-scale real-world context in a distributed environment. Moreover, existing distributed deep learning framework is not designed for deep metric learning tasks, because it is difficult to implement a smart mining policy of valuable training data. In this paper, we introduce a novel distributed framework to speed up the training process of the deep metric learning using multiple machines. Specifically, we first design a distributed sampling method to find the hard-negative samples from a broader scope of candidate samples compared to the single-machine solution. Then, we design a hybrid communication pattern and implement a decentralized data-parallel framework to reduce the communication workload while the quality of the trained deep metric models is preserved. In experiments, we show excellent performance gain compared to a full spectrum of state-of-the-art deep metric learning models on multiple datasets in terms of image clustering and image retrieval tasks.