Towards Understanding and Mitigating Dimensional Collapse in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shi, Yujun, Liang, Jian, Zhang, Wenqing, Tan, Vincent Y. F., Bai, Song
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911829080408064
author Shi, Yujun
Liang, Jian
Zhang, Wenqing
Tan, Vincent Y. F.
Bai, Song
author_facet Shi, Yujun
Liang, Jian
Zhang, Wenqing
Tan, Vincent Y. F.
Bai, Song
contents Federated learning aims to train models collaboratively across different clients without the sharing of data for privacy considerations. However, one major challenge for this learning paradigm is the {\em data heterogeneity} problem, which refers to the discrepancies between the local data distributions among various clients. To tackle this problem, we first study how data heterogeneity affects the representations of the globally aggregated models. Interestingly, we find that heterogeneous data results in the global model suffering from severe {\em dimensional collapse}, in which representations tend to reside in a lower-dimensional space instead of the ambient space. Moreover, we observe a similar phenomenon on models locally trained on each client and deduce that the dimensional collapse on the global model is inherited from local models. In addition, we theoretically analyze the gradient flow dynamics to shed light on how data heterogeneity result in dimensional collapse for local models. To remedy this problem caused by the data heterogeneity, we propose {\sc FedDecorr}, a novel method that can effectively mitigate dimensional collapse in federated learning. Specifically, {\sc FedDecorr} applies a regularization term during local training that encourages different dimensions of representations to be uncorrelated. {\sc FedDecorr}, which is implementation-friendly and computationally-efficient, yields consistent improvements over baselines on standard benchmark datasets. Code: https://github.com/bytedance/FedDecorr.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_00226
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Understanding and Mitigating Dimensional Collapse in Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Shi, Yujun
Liang, Jian
Zhang, Wenqing
Tan, Vincent Y. F.
Bai, Song
Machine Learning
Federated learning aims to train models collaboratively across different clients without the sharing of data for privacy considerations. However, one major challenge for this learning paradigm is the {\em data heterogeneity} problem, which refers to the discrepancies between the local data distributions among various clients. To tackle this problem, we first study how data heterogeneity affects the representations of the globally aggregated models. Interestingly, we find that heterogeneous data results in the global model suffering from severe {\em dimensional collapse}, in which representations tend to reside in a lower-dimensional space instead of the ambient space. Moreover, we observe a similar phenomenon on models locally trained on each client and deduce that the dimensional collapse on the global model is inherited from local models. In addition, we theoretically analyze the gradient flow dynamics to shed light on how data heterogeneity result in dimensional collapse for local models. To remedy this problem caused by the data heterogeneity, we propose {\sc FedDecorr}, a novel method that can effectively mitigate dimensional collapse in federated learning. Specifically, {\sc FedDecorr} applies a regularization term during local training that encourages different dimensions of representations to be uncorrelated. {\sc FedDecorr}, which is implementation-friendly and computationally-efficient, yields consistent improvements over baselines on standard benchmark datasets. Code: https://github.com/bytedance/FedDecorr.
title Towards Understanding and Mitigating Dimensional Collapse in Heterogeneous Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.00226