Fast Convergent Federated Learning with Aggregated Gradients

Federated Learning (FL) is a novel machine learning framework, which enables multiple distributed devices cooperatively to train a shared model scheduled by a central server while protecting private data locally. However, the non-independent-and-identically-distributed (Non-IID) data samples and frequent communication across participants may significantly slow down the convergent rate and increase communication costs. To achieve fast convergence, we ameliorate the conventional local updating rule by introducing the aggregated gradients at each local update epoch, and propose an adaptive learning rate algorithm that further takes the deviation of local parameter and global parameter into consideration. The above adaptive learning rate design requires all clients' local information including the local parameters and gradients, which is challenging as there is no communication during the local update epochs. To obtain a decentralized adaptive learning rate for each client, we utilize the mean field approach by introducing two mean field terms to estimate the average local parameters and gradients respectively, which does not require the clients to exchange their local information with each other at each local epoch. Numerical results show that our proposed framework is superior to the state-of-art FL schemes in both model accuracy and convergent rate for IID and Non-IID datasets.

Adaptive Federated Learning via New Entropy Approach

Federated Learning (FL) has recently emerged as a popular framework, which allows resource-constrained discrete clients to cooperatively learn the global model under the orchestration of a central server while storing privacy-sensitive data locally. However, due to the difference in equipment and data divergence of heterogeneous clients, there will be parameter deviation between local models, resulting in a slow convergence rate and a reduction of the accuracy of the global model. The current FL algorithms use the static client learning strategy pervasively and can not adapt to the dynamic training parameters of different clients. In this paper, by considering the deviation between different local model parameters, we propose an adaptive learning rate scheme for each client based on entropy theory to alleviate the deviation between heterogeneous clients and achieve fast convergence of the global model. It's difficult to design the optimal dynamic learning rate for each client as the local information of other clients is unknown, especially during the local training epochs without communications between local clients and the central server. To enable a decentralized learning rate design for each client, we first introduce mean-field schemes to estimate the terms related to other clients' local model parameters. Then the decentralized adaptive learning rate for each client is obtained in closed form by constructing the Hamilton equation. Moreover, we prove that there exist fixed point solutions for the mean-field estimators, and an algorithm is proposed to obtain them. Finally, extensive experimental results on real datasets show that our algorithm can effectively eliminate the deviation between local model parameters compared to other recent FL algorithms.