Distributed Computing of Functions of Structured Sources with Helper Side Information

Abstract: In this work, we consider the problem of distributed computing of functions of structured sources, focusing on the classical setting of two correlated sources and one user that seeks the outcome of the function while benefiting from low-rate side information provided by a helper node. Focusing on the case where the sources are jointly distributed according to a very general mixture model, we here provide an achievable coding scheme that manages to substantially reduce the communication cost of distributed computing by exploiting the nature of the joint distribution of the sources, the side information, as well as the symmetry enjoyed by the desired functions. Our scheme -- which can readily apply in a variety of real-life scenarios including learning, combinatorics, and graph neural network applications -- is here shown to provide substantial reductions in the communication costs, while simultaneously providing computational savings by reducing the exponential complexity of joint decoding techniques to a complexity that is merely linear.