[2603.24128] On Gossip Algorithms for Machine Learning with Pairwise Objectives

Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2603.24128 (cs) [Submitted on 25 Mar 2026] Title:On Gossip Algorithms for Machine Learning with Pairwise Objectives Authors:Igor Colin (LTCI, S2A, IP Paris), Aurélien Bellet (PREMEDICAL), Stephan Clémençon (LTCI, IDS, S2A, IP Paris), Joseph Salmon (IROKO, UM) View a PDF of the paper titled On Gossip Algorithms for Machine Learning with Pairwise Objectives, by Igor Colin (LTCI and 9 other authors View PDF Abstract:In the IoT era, information is more and more frequently picked up by connected smart sensors with increasing, though limited, storage, communication and computation abilities. Whether due to privacy constraints or to the structure of the distributed system, the development of statistical learning methods dedicated to data that are shared over a network is now a major issue. Gossip-based algorithms have been developed for the purpose of solving a wide variety of statistical learning tasks, ranging from data aggregation over sensor networks to decentralized multi-agent optimization. Whereas the vast majority of contributions consider situations where the function to be estimated or optimized is a basic average of individual observations, it is the goal of this article to investigate the case where the latter is of pairwise nature, taking the form of a U -statistic of degree two. Motivated by various problems such as similarity learning, ranking or clustering for instance, we revisit gossip algorithms specifically designed fo...