  Decentralized optimization with time-varying networks is an emerging paradigm
in machine learning. It saves remarkable communication overhead in large-scale
deep training and is more robust in wireless scenarios especially when nodes
are moving. Federated learning can also be regarded as decentralized
optimization with time-varying communication patterns alternating between
global averaging and local updates.
  While numerous studies exist to clarify its theoretical limits and develop
efficient algorithms, it remains unclear what the optimal complexity is for
non-convex decentralized stochastic optimization over time-varying networks.
The main difficulties lie in how to gauge the effectiveness when transmitting
messages between two nodes via time-varying communications, and how to
establish the lower bound when the network size is fixed (which is a
prerequisite in stochastic optimization). This paper resolves these challenges
and establish the first lower bound complexity. We also develop a new
decentralized algorithm to nearly attain the lower bound, showing the tightness
of the lower bound and the optimality of our algorithm.

Machine Learning;Optimization and Control