Abstract
Federated Learning (FL) refers to the paradigm where multiple worker nodes (WNs) build a joint model by using local data. Despite extensive research, for a generic non-convex FL problem, it is not clear, how to choose the WNs' and the server's update directions, the minibatch sizes, and the number of local updates, so that the WNs use the minimum number of samples and communication rounds to achieve the desired solution. This work addresses the above question and considers a class of stochastic algorithms where the WNs perform a few local updates before communication. We show that when both the WN's and the server's directions are chosen based on certain stochastic momentum estimator, the algorithm requires Õ(ε-3/2) samples and Õ(ε-1) communication rounds to compute an ε-stationary solution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first FL algorithm that achieves such near-optimal sample and communication complexities simultaneously. Further, we show that there is a trade-off curve between the number of local updates and the minibatch sizes, on which the above sample and communication complexities can be maintained. Finally, we show that for the classical FedAvg (a.k.a. Local SGD, which is a momentum-less special case of the STEM), a similar trade-off curve exists, albeit with worse sample and communication complexities. Our insights on this trade-off provides guidelines for choosing the four important design elements for FL algorithms, the number of local updates, WNs' and server's update directions, and minibatch sizes to achieve the best performance.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 - 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 |
Editors | Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Alina Beygelzimer, Yann Dauphin, Percy S. Liang, Jenn Wortman Vaughan |
Publisher | Neural information processing systems foundation |
Pages | 6050-6061 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781713845393 |
State | Published - 2021 |
Event | 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 - Virtual, Online Duration: Dec 6 2021 → Dec 14 2021 |
Publication series
Name | Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems |
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Volume | 8 |
ISSN (Print) | 1049-5258 |
Conference
Conference | 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 |
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City | Virtual, Online |
Period | 12/6/21 → 12/14/21 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. The work of Prashant Khanduri and Mingyi Hong was supported by NSF grant CMMI-1727757, AFOSR grant 19RT0424 and ARO grant W911NF-19-1-0247. The work of Mingyi Hong was also supported by an IBM Faculty Research award. The work of Jia Liu has been supported in part by NSF grants CAREER CNS-2110259, CNS-2112471, CNS-2102233, CCF-2110252, ECCS-2140277, and a Google Faculty Research Award.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Neural information processing systems foundation. All rights reserved.