My first ever optimization project was an ICML paper about an asynchronous gradient method. At the time, I was quite confused by the fact that no matter what I was doing, Asynchronous gradient descent still converged. Five years later, I can finally give an answer: Because Asynchronous SGD doesn’t care about the delays, which we proved in https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07638"our new paper. For a short summary, you can read my twitter thread about the paper or check my slides.

In a few days, I am travelling to Autrans, Vercors near Grenoble for the SICO conference dedicated to the 60th birthday of Anatoli Juditsky. The conference will feature a number of speakers working on optimization and statistics. As I did my master’s thesis at the University of Grenoble, I’m really happy to go there again after having been away for almost 5 years.

On the last day of the conference, I will give a talk about a new paper on Asynchronous SGD. The work that I will present is also going to appear online quite soon.

Two of my papers got accepted for presentation at ICML:

• ProxSkip: Yes! Local Gradient Steps Provably Lead to Communication Acceleration! Finally!
• Proximal and Federated Random Reshuffling

The first of these two papers was a first-time submission and the latter was a resubmission. Earlier, we opted in to release online the reviews for the Prox RR paper from NeurIPS 2021, so the ICML reviewers could see (if they searched) that our work was previously rejected. Nevertheless, it was recommended for acceptance.
Although I’m happy about my works, I feel there is still a lot of changed required to fix the reviewing process. One thing that I’m personally waiting for is that every conference would use OpenReview instead of CMT. OpenReview give the opportunity to write individual responses to the reviewers and supports LaTeX in the editor, which are amazing things.
If your paper did not get accepted, don’t take it as a strong evidence that your work is not appreciated, it often happens to high-quality works. A good example of this is the recent revelation by Mark Schmidt on Twitter that their famous SAG paper was rejected from ICML 2012.

I have been selected as a “Highlighted Reviewer of ICLR 2022”, which seems to be this-year’s version of reviewer award. All reviewers are listed on the ICLR website https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2022/Reviewers. Based on my rough estimate, about 10% of reviewers received this award.