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Main Authors: Dhawan, Nikita, Mitchell, Nicole, Charles, Zachary, Garrett, Zachary, Dziugaite, Gintare Karolina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10291
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author Dhawan, Nikita
Mitchell, Nicole
Charles, Zachary
Garrett, Zachary
Dziugaite, Gintare Karolina
author_facet Dhawan, Nikita
Mitchell, Nicole
Charles, Zachary
Garrett, Zachary
Dziugaite, Gintare Karolina
contents The federated learning paradigm has motivated the development of methods for aggregating multiple client updates into a global server model, without sharing client data. Many federated learning algorithms, including the canonical Federated Averaging (FedAvg), take a direct (possibly weighted) average of the client parameter updates, motivated by results in distributed optimization. In this work, we adopt a function space perspective and propose a new algorithm, FedFish, that aggregates local approximations to the functions learned by clients, using an estimate based on their Fisher information. We evaluate FedFish on realistic, large-scale cross-device benchmarks. While the performance of FedAvg can suffer as client models drift further apart, we demonstrate that FedFish is more robust to longer local training. Our evaluation across several settings in image and language benchmarks shows that FedFish outperforms FedAvg as local training epochs increase. Further, FedFish results in global networks that are more amenable to efficient personalization via local fine-tuning on the same or shifted data distributions. For instance, federated pretraining on the C4 dataset, followed by few-shot personalization on Stack Overflow, results in a 7% improvement in next-token prediction by FedFish over FedAvg.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_10291
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging Function Space Aggregation for Federated Learning at Scale
Dhawan, Nikita
Mitchell, Nicole
Charles, Zachary
Garrett, Zachary
Dziugaite, Gintare Karolina
Machine Learning
The federated learning paradigm has motivated the development of methods for aggregating multiple client updates into a global server model, without sharing client data. Many federated learning algorithms, including the canonical Federated Averaging (FedAvg), take a direct (possibly weighted) average of the client parameter updates, motivated by results in distributed optimization. In this work, we adopt a function space perspective and propose a new algorithm, FedFish, that aggregates local approximations to the functions learned by clients, using an estimate based on their Fisher information. We evaluate FedFish on realistic, large-scale cross-device benchmarks. While the performance of FedAvg can suffer as client models drift further apart, we demonstrate that FedFish is more robust to longer local training. Our evaluation across several settings in image and language benchmarks shows that FedFish outperforms FedAvg as local training epochs increase. Further, FedFish results in global networks that are more amenable to efficient personalization via local fine-tuning on the same or shifted data distributions. For instance, federated pretraining on the C4 dataset, followed by few-shot personalization on Stack Overflow, results in a 7% improvement in next-token prediction by FedFish over FedAvg.
title Leveraging Function Space Aggregation for Federated Learning at Scale
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10291