This paper studies the algorithmic stability and generalizability of decentralized stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD). We prove that the consensus model learned by D-SGD is O(m/N +1/m+λ 2 )-stable in expectation in the non-convex non-smooth setting, where N is the total sample size of the whole system, m is the worker number, and 1−λ is the spectral gap that measures the connectivity of the communication topology. These results then deliver an2 ) in-average generalization bound, which is nonvacuous even when λ is closed to 1, in contrast to vacuous as suggested by existing literature on the projected version of D-SGD. Our theory indicates that the generalizability of D-SGD has a positive correlation with the spectral gap, and can explain why consensus control in initial training phase can ensure better generalization. Experiments of VGG-11 and ResNet-18 on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet justify our theory. To our best knowledge, this is the first work on the topology-aware generalization of vanilla D-SGD. Code is available at https://github.com/Raiden-Zhu/ Generalization-of-DSGD.
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