Towards Understanding Generalization and Stability Gaps between Centralized and Decentralized Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sun, Yan, Shen, Li, Tao, Dacheng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Sun, Yan
Shen, Li
Tao, Dacheng
author_facet Sun, Yan
Shen, Li
Tao, Dacheng
contents As two mainstream frameworks in federated learning (FL), both centralized and decentralized approaches have shown great application value in practical scenarios. However, existing studies do not provide sufficient evidence and clear guidance for analysis of which performs better in the FL community. Although decentralized methods have been proven to approach the comparable convergence of centralized with less communication, their test performance always falls short of expectations in empirical studies. To comprehensively and fairly compare their efficiency gaps in FL, in this paper, we explore their stability and generalization efficiency. Specifically, we prove that on the general smooth non-convex objectives, 1) centralized FL (CFL) always generalizes better than decentralized FL (DFL); 2) CFL achieves the best performance via adopting partial participation instead of full participation; and, 3) there is a necessary requirement for the topology in DFL to avoid performance collapse as the training scale increases. We also conduct extensive experiments on several common setups in FL to validate that our theoretical analysis is consistent with experimental phenomena and contextually valid in several general and practical scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_03461
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Understanding Generalization and Stability Gaps between Centralized and Decentralized Federated Learning
Sun, Yan
Shen, Li
Tao, Dacheng
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
As two mainstream frameworks in federated learning (FL), both centralized and decentralized approaches have shown great application value in practical scenarios. However, existing studies do not provide sufficient evidence and clear guidance for analysis of which performs better in the FL community. Although decentralized methods have been proven to approach the comparable convergence of centralized with less communication, their test performance always falls short of expectations in empirical studies. To comprehensively and fairly compare their efficiency gaps in FL, in this paper, we explore their stability and generalization efficiency. Specifically, we prove that on the general smooth non-convex objectives, 1) centralized FL (CFL) always generalizes better than decentralized FL (DFL); 2) CFL achieves the best performance via adopting partial participation instead of full participation; and, 3) there is a necessary requirement for the topology in DFL to avoid performance collapse as the training scale increases. We also conduct extensive experiments on several common setups in FL to validate that our theoretical analysis is consistent with experimental phenomena and contextually valid in several general and practical scenarios.
title Towards Understanding Generalization and Stability Gaps between Centralized and Decentralized Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03461