Federated Learning of a Mixture of Global and Local Models

By Filip Hanzely, Peter Richtárik. 2020

447 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a new optimization formulation for training federated learning models. The standard formulation has the form of an empirical risk minimization problem constructed to find a single global model trained from the private data stored across all participating devices. In contrast, our formulation seeks an explicit trade-off between this traditional global model and the local models, which can be learned by each device from its own private data without any communication. Further, we develop several efficient variants of SGD (with and without partial participation and with and without variance reduction) for solving the new formulation and prove communication complexity guarantees. Notably, our methods are similar but not identical to federated averaging / local SGD, thus shedding some light on the essence of the elusive method. In particular, our methods do not perform full averaging steps and instead merely take steps towards averaging. We argue for the benefits of this new paradigm for federated learning.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Federated & Distributed Learning

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

  1. Peter Richtárik
  2. Aryan Mokhtari
  3. Guodong Long
  4. Jing Jiang
  5. Filip Hanzely
  6. Jakub Konecný
  7. Qiang Yang
  8. Virginia Smith

In Federated & Distributed Learning

  1. Aryan Mokhtari
  2. Peter Richtárik
  3. Bingsheng He
  4. Qinbin Li
  5. Tian Li
  6. Qiang Yang
  7. Mehrdad Mahdavi
  8. Virginia Smith

Citations in the corpus