One-shot Federated Learning without Server-side Training

Federated Learning (FL) has recently made significant progress as a new machine learning paradigm for privacy protection. Due to the high communication cost of traditional FL, one-shot federated learning is gaining popularity as a way to reduce communication cost between clients and the server. Most of the existing one-shot FL methods are based on Knowledge Distillation; however, distillation based approach requires an extra training phase and depends on publicly available data sets. In this work, we consider a novel and challenging setting: performing a single round of parameter aggregation on the local models without server-side training on a public data set. In this new setting, we propose an effective algorithm for Model Aggregation via Exploring Common Harmonized Optima (MA-Echo), which iteratively updates the parameters of all local models to bring them close to a common low-loss area on the loss surface, without harming performance on their own data sets at the same time. Compared to the existing methods, MA-Echo can work well even in extremely non-identical data distribution settings where the support categories of each local model have no overlapped labels with those of the others. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular image classification data sets to compare the proposed method with existing methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of MA-Echo, which clearly outperforms the state-of-the-arts.