Unverified
2026
Decoder-Side Refinement for Heavy-Tailed Gradients
Replace ordinary sign-gradient or fixed-range gradient quantization in distributed training with a non-adaptive one-bit refinement block. Workers generate all localization and multiscale residue bits using public randomness before the server knows the current aggregate gradient; after decoding a coarse center, the server chooses which stored phase and scale interpretation to use. This should reduce clipping and variance for heavy-tailed gradients without requiring a second communication round.
Paper: Universal Refinement without Interaction: Order-Optimal 1-Bit Mean Estimation
arXiv:2607.24358