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Main Authors: Li, Bo, Esfandiari, Yasin, Schmidt, Mikkel N., Alstrøm, Tommy S., Stich, Sebastian U.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13263
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author Li, Bo
Esfandiari, Yasin
Schmidt, Mikkel N.
Alstrøm, Tommy S.
Stich, Sebastian U.
author_facet Li, Bo
Esfandiari, Yasin
Schmidt, Mikkel N.
Alstrøm, Tommy S.
Stich, Sebastian U.
contents In federated learning, data heterogeneity is a critical challenge. A straightforward solution is to shuffle the clients' data to homogenize the distribution. However, this may violate data access rights, and how and when shuffling can accelerate the convergence of a federated optimization algorithm is not theoretically well understood. In this paper, we establish a precise and quantifiable correspondence between data heterogeneity and parameters in the convergence rate when a fraction of data is shuffled across clients. We prove that shuffling can quadratically reduce the gradient dissimilarity with respect to the shuffling percentage, accelerating convergence. Inspired by the theory, we propose a practical approach that addresses the data access rights issue by shuffling locally generated synthetic data. The experimental results show that shuffling synthetic data improves the performance of multiple existing federated learning algorithms by a large margin.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_13263
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synthetic data shuffling accelerates the convergence of federated learning under data heterogeneity
Li, Bo
Esfandiari, Yasin
Schmidt, Mikkel N.
Alstrøm, Tommy S.
Stich, Sebastian U.
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
In federated learning, data heterogeneity is a critical challenge. A straightforward solution is to shuffle the clients' data to homogenize the distribution. However, this may violate data access rights, and how and when shuffling can accelerate the convergence of a federated optimization algorithm is not theoretically well understood. In this paper, we establish a precise and quantifiable correspondence between data heterogeneity and parameters in the convergence rate when a fraction of data is shuffled across clients. We prove that shuffling can quadratically reduce the gradient dissimilarity with respect to the shuffling percentage, accelerating convergence. Inspired by the theory, we propose a practical approach that addresses the data access rights issue by shuffling locally generated synthetic data. The experimental results show that shuffling synthetic data improves the performance of multiple existing federated learning algorithms by a large margin.
title Synthetic data shuffling accelerates the convergence of federated learning under data heterogeneity
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13263