No Arabic abstract
Federated learning allows distributed devices to collectively train a model without sharing or disclosing the local dataset with a central server. The global model is optimized by training and averaging the model parameters of all local participants. However, the improved privacy of federated learning also introduces challenges including higher computation and communication costs. In particular, federated learning converges slower than centralized training. We propose the server averaging algorithm to accelerate convergence. Sever averaging constructs the shared global model by periodically averaging a set of previous global models. Our experiments indicate that server averaging not only converges faster, to a target accuracy, than federated averaging (FedAvg), but also reduces the computation costs on the client-level through epoch decay.
Federated learning is an effective approach to realize collaborative learning among edge devices without exchanging raw data. In practice, these devices may connect to local hubs instead of connecting to the global server (aggregator) directly. Due to the (possibly limited) computation capability of these local hubs, it is reasonable to assume that they can perform simple averaging operations. A natural question is whether such local averaging is beneficial under different system parameters and how much gain can be obtained compared to the case without such averaging. In this paper, we study hierarchical federated learning with stochastic gradient descent (HF-SGD) and conduct a thorough theoretical analysis to analyze its convergence behavior. In particular, we first consider the two-level HF-SGD (one level of local averaging) and then extend this result to arbitrary number of levels (multiple levels of local averaging). The analysis demonstrates the impact of local averaging precisely as a function of system parameters. Due to the higher communication cost of global averaging, a strategy of decreasing the global averaging frequency and increasing the local averaging frequency is proposed. Experiments validate the proposed theoretical analysis and the advantages of HF-SGD.
In the paper, we propose an effective and efficient Compositional Federated Learning (ComFedL) algorithm for solving a new compositional Federated Learning (FL) framework, which frequently appears in many machine learning problems with a hierarchical structure such as distributionally robust federated learning and model-agnostic meta learning (MAML). Moreover, we study the convergence analysis of our ComFedL algorithm under some mild conditions, and prove that it achieves a fast convergence rate of $O(frac{1}{sqrt{T}})$, where $T$ denotes the number of iteration. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first work to bridge federated learning with composition stochastic optimization. In particular, we first transform the distributionally robust FL (i.e., a minimax optimization problem) into a simple composition optimization problem by using KL divergence regularization. At the same time, we also first transform the distribution-agnostic MAML problem (i.e., a minimax optimization problem) into a simple composition optimization problem. Finally, we apply two popular machine learning tasks, i.e., distributionally robust FL and MAML to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.
Personalization methods in federated learning aim to balance the benefits of federated and local training for data availability, communication cost, and robustness to client heterogeneity. Approaches that require clients to communicate all model parameters can be undesirable due to privacy and communication constraints. Other approaches require always-available or stateful clients, impractical in large-scale cross-device settings. We introduce Federated Reconstruction, the first model-agnostic framework for partially local federated learning suitable for training and inference at scale. We motivate the framework via a connection to model-agnostic meta learning, empirically demonstrate its performance over existing approaches for collaborative filtering and next word prediction, and release an open-source library for evaluating approaches in this setting. We also describe the successful deployment of this approach at scale for federated collaborative filtering in a mobile keyboard application.
Federated learning involves a mixture of centralized and decentralized processing tasks, where a server regularly selects a sample of the agents and these in turn sample their local data to compute stochastic gradients for their learning updates. This process runs continually. The sampling of both agents and data is generally uniform; however, in this work we consider non-uniform sampling. We derive optimal importance sampling strategies for both agent and data selection and show that non-uniform sampling without replacement improves the performance of the original FedAvg algorithm. We run experiments on a regression and classification problem to illustrate the theoretical results.
We study practical data characteristics underlying federated learning, where non-i.i.d. data from clients have sparse features, and a certain clients local data normally involves only a small part of the full model, called a submodel. Due to data sparsity, the classical federated averaging (FedAvg) algorithm or its variants will be severely slowed down, because when updating the global model, each clients zero update of the full model excluding its submodel is inaccurately aggregated. Therefore, we propose federated submodel averaging (FedSubAvg), ensuring that the expectation of the global update of each model parameter is equal to the average of the local updates of the clients who involve it. We theoretically proved the convergence rate of FedSubAvg by deriving an upper bound under a new metric called the element-wise gradient norm. In particular, this new metric can characterize the convergence of federated optimization over sparse data, while the conventional metric of squared gradient norm used in FedAvg and its variants cannot. We extensively evaluated FedSubAvg over both public and industrial datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate that FedSubAvg significantly outperforms FedAvg and its variants.