Federated learning allows multiple parties to jointly train a deep learning model on their combined data, without any of the participants having to reveal their local data to a centralized server. This form of privacy-preserving collaborative learning, however, comes at the cost of a significant communication overhead during training. To address this problem, several compression methods have been proposed in the distributed training literature that can reduce the amount of required communication by up to three orders of magnitude. These existing methods, however, are only of limited utility in the federated learning setting, as they either only compress the upstream communication from the clients to the server (leaving the downstream communication uncompressed) or only perform well under idealized conditions, such as i.i.d. distribution of the client data, which typically cannot be found in federated learning. In this article, we propose sparse ternary compression (STC), a new compression framework that is specifically designed to meet the requirements of the federated learning environment. STC extends the existing compression technique of top-k gradient sparsification with a novel mechanism to enable downstream compression as well as ternarization and optimal Golomb encoding of the weight updates. Our experiments on four different learning tasks demonstrate that STC distinctively outperforms federated averaging in common federated learning scenarios. These results advocate for a paradigm shift in federated optimization toward high-frequency low-bitwidth communication, in particular in the bandwidth-constrained learning environments.

Federated learning (FL) is currently the most widely adopted framework for collaborative training of (deep) machine learning models under privacy constraints. Albeit its popularity, it has been observed that FL yields suboptimal results if the local clients' data distributions diverge. To address this issue, we present clustered FL (CFL), a novel federated multitask learning (FMTL) framework, which exploits geometric properties of the FL loss surface to group the client population into clusters with jointly trainable data distributions. In contrast to existing FMTL approaches, CFL does not require any modifications to the FL communication protocol to be made, is applicable to general nonconvex objectives (in particular, deep neural networks), does not require the number of clusters to be known a priori, and comes with strong mathematical guarantees on the clustering quality. CFL is flexible enough to handle client populations that vary over time and can be implemented in a privacy-preserving way. As clustering is only performed after FL has converged to a stationary point, CFL can be viewed as a postprocessing method that will always achieve greater or equal performance than conventional FL by allowing clients to arrive at more specialized models. We verify our theoretical analysis in experiments with deep convolutional and recurrent neural networks on commonly used FL data sets.

Currently, progressively larger deep neural networks are trained on ever growing data corpora. As this trend is only going to increase in the future, distributed training schemes are becoming increasingly relevant. A major issue in distributed training is the limited communication bandwidth between contributing nodes or prohibitive communication cost in general. These challenges become even more pressing, as the number of computation nodes increases. To counteract this development we propose sparse binary compression (SBC), a compression framework that allows for a drastic reduction of communication cost for distributed training. SBC combines existing techniques of communication delay and gradient sparsification with a novel binarization method and optimal weight update encoding to push compression gains to new limits. By doing so, our method also allows us to smoothly trade-off gradient sparsity and temporal sparsity to adapt to the requirements of the learning task. Our experiments show, that SBC can reduce the upstream communication on a variety of convolutional and recurrent neural network architectures by more than four orders of magnitude without significantly harming the convergence speed in terms of forward-backward passes. For instance, we can train ResNet50 on ImageNet in the same number of iterations to the baseline accuracy, using ×3531 less bits or train it to a 1% lower accuracy using ×37208 less bits. In the latter case, the total upstream communication required is cut from 125 terabytes to 3.35 gigabytes for every participating client.

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Federated Learning allows multiple parties to jointly train a deep learning model on their combined data, without any of the participants having to reveal their local data to a centralized server. This form of privacy-preserving collaborative learning however comes at the cost of a significant communication overhead during training. To address this problem, several compression methods have been proposed in the distributed training literature that can reduce the amount of required communication by up to three orders of magnitude. These existing methods however are only of limited utility in the Federated Learning setting, as they either only compress the upstream communication from the clients to the server (leaving the downstream communication uncompressed) or only perform well under idealized conditions such as iid distribution of the client data, which typically can not be found in Federated Learning. In this work, we propose Sparse Ternary Compression (STC), a new compression framework that is specifically designed to meet the requirements of the Federated Learning environment. STC extends the existing compression technique of top-k gradient sparsification with a novel mechanism to enable downstream compression as well as ternarization and optimal Golomb encoding of the weight updates. Our experiments on four different learning tasks demonstrate that STC distinctively outperforms Federated Averaging in common Federated Learning scenarios where clients either a) hold non-iid data, b) use small batch sizes during training, or where c) the number of clients is large and the participation rate in every communication round is low. We furthermore show that even if the clients hold iid data and use medium sized batches for training, STC still behaves paretosuperior to Federated Averaging in the sense that it achieves fixed target accuracies on our benchmarks within both fewer training iterations and a smaller communication budget. These results advocate for a paradigm shift in Federated optimization towards high-frequency low-bitwidth communication, in particular in bandwidth-constrained learning environments.