No Arabic abstract
Federated learning (FL) has attracted tremendous attentions in recent years due to its privacy preserving measures and great potentials in some distributed but privacy-sensitive applications like finance and health. However, high communication overloads for transmitting high-dimensional networks and extra security masks remains a bottleneck of FL. This paper proposes a communication-efficient FL framework with Adaptive Quantized Gradient (AQG) which adaptively adjusts the quantization level based on local gradients update to fully utilize the heterogeneousness of local data distribution for reducing unnecessary transmissions. Besides, the client dropout issues are taken into account and the Augmented AQG is developed, which could limit the dropout noise with an appropriate amplification mechanism for transmitted gradients. Theoretical analysis and experiment results show that the proposed AQG leads to 25%-50% of additional transmission reduction as compared to existing popular methods including Quantized Gradient Descent (QGD) and Lazily Aggregated Quantized (LAQ) gradient-based method without deteriorating convergence properties. Particularly, experiments with heterogenous data distributions corroborate a more significant transmission reduction compared with independent identical data distributions. Meanwhile, the proposed AQG is robust to a client dropping rate up to 90% empirically, and the Augmented AQG manages to further improve the FL systems communication efficiency with the presence of moderate-scale client dropouts commonly seen in practical FL scenarios.
Communication of model updates between client nodes and the central aggregating server is a major bottleneck in federated learning, especially in bandwidth-limited settings and high-dimensional models. Gradient quantization is an effective way of reducing the number of bits required to communicate each model update, albeit at the cost of having a higher error floor due to the higher variance of the stochastic gradients. In this work, we propose an adaptive quantization strategy called AdaQuantFL that aims to achieve communication efficiency as well as a low error floor by changing the number of quantization levels during the course of training. Experiments on training deep neural networks show that our method can converge in much fewer communicated bits as compared to fixed quantization level setups, with little or no impact on training and test accuracy.
Federated learning can enable remote workers to collaboratively train a shared machine learning model while allowing training data to be kept locally. In the use case of wireless mobile devices, the communication overhead is a critical bottleneck due to limited power and bandwidth. Prior work has utilized various data compression tools such as quantization and sparsification to reduce the overhead. In this paper, we propose a predictive coding based communication scheme for federated learning. The scheme has shared prediction functions among all devices and allows each worker to transmit a compressed residual vector derived from the reference. In each communication round, we select the predictor and quantizer based on the rate-distortion cost, and further reduce the redundancy with entropy coding. Extensive simulations reveal that the communication cost can be reduced up to 99% with even better learning performance when compared with other baseline methods.
Federated learning facilitates learning across clients without transferring local data on these clients to a central server. Despite the success of the federated learning method, it remains to improve further w.r.t communicating the most critical information to update a model under limited communication conditions, which can benefit this learning scheme into a wide range of application scenarios. In this work, we propose a nonlinear quantization for compressed stochastic gradient descent, which can be easily utilized in federated learning. Based on the proposed quantization, our system significantly reduces the communication cost by up to three orders of magnitude, while maintaining convergence and accuracy of the training process to a large extent. Extensive experiments are conducted on image classification and brain tumor semantic segmentation using the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and BraTS datasets where we show state-of-the-art effectiveness and impressive communication efficiency.
Existing approaches to federated learning suffer from a communication bottleneck as well as convergence issues due to sparse client participation. In this paper we introduce a novel algorithm, called FetchSGD, to overcome these challenges. FetchSGD compresses model updates using a Count Sketch, and then takes advantage of the mergeability of sketches to combine model updates from many workers. A key insight in the design of FetchSGD is that, because the Count Sketch is linear, momentum and error accumulation can both be carried out within the sketch. This allows the algorithm to move momentum and error accumulation from clients to the central aggregator, overcoming the challenges of sparse client participation while still achieving high compression rates and good convergence. We prove that FetchSGD has favorable convergence guarantees, and we demonstrate its empirical effectiveness by training two residual networks and a transformer model.
This study develops a federated learning (FL) framework overcoming largely incremental communication costs due to model sizes in typical frameworks without compromising model performance. To this end, based on the idea of leveraging an unlabeled open dataset, we propose a distillation-based semi-supervised FL (DS-FL) algorithm that exchanges the outputs of local models among mobile devices, instead of model parameter exchange employed by the typical frameworks. In DS-FL, the communication cost depends only on the output dimensions of the models and does not scale up according to the model size. The exchanged model outputs are used to label each sample of the open dataset, which creates an additionally labeled dataset. Based on the new dataset, local models are further trained, and model performance is enhanced owing to the data augmentation effect. We further highlight that in DS-FL, the heterogeneity of the devices dataset leads to ambiguous of each data sample and lowing of the training convergence. To prevent this, we propose entropy reduction averaging, where the aggregated model outputs are intentionally sharpened. Moreover, extensive experiments show that DS-FL reduces communication costs up to 99% relative to those of the FL benchmark while achieving similar or higher classification accuracy.