Efficient Unbiased Sparsification

An unbiased $m$-sparsification of a vector $p\in \mathbb{R}^n$ is a random vector $Q\in \mathbb{R}^n$ with mean $p$ that has at most $m<n$ nonzero coordinates. Unbiased sparsification compresses the original vector without introducing bias; it arises in various contexts, such as in federated learning and sampling sparse probability distributions. Ideally, unbiased sparsification should also minimize the expected value of a divergence function $\mathsf{Div}(Q,p)$ that measures how far away $Q$ is from the original $p$. If $Q$ is optimal in this sense, then we call it efficient. Our main results describe efficient unbiased sparsifications for divergences that are either permutation-invariant or additively separable. Surprisingly, the characterization for permutation-invariant divergences is robust to the choice of divergence function, in the sense that our class of optimal $Q$ for squared Euclidean distance coincides with our class of optimal $Q$ for Kullback-Leibler divergence, or indeed any of a wide variety of divergences.