Trading-off Accuracy and Communication Cost in Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Villani, Mattia Jacopo, Natale, Emanuele, Mallmann-Trenn, Frederik
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Villani, Mattia Jacopo
Natale, Emanuele
Mallmann-Trenn, Frederik
author_facet Villani, Mattia Jacopo
Natale, Emanuele
Mallmann-Trenn, Frederik
contents Leveraging the training-by-pruning paradigm introduced by Zhou et al. and Isik et al. introduced a federated learning protocol that achieves a 34-fold reduction in communication cost. We achieve a compression improvements of orders of orders of magnitude over the state-of-the-art. The central idea of our framework is to encode the network weights $\vec w$ by a the vector of trainable parameters $\vec p$, such that $\vec w = Q\cdot \vec p$ where $Q$ is a carefully-generate sparse random matrix (that remains fixed throughout training). In such framework, the previous work of Zhou et al. [NeurIPS'19] is retrieved when $Q$ is diagonal and $\vec p$ has the same dimension of $\vec w$. We instead show that $\vec p$ can effectively be chosen much smaller than $\vec w$, while retaining the same accuracy at the price of a decrease of the sparsity of $Q$. Since server and clients only need to share $\vec p$, such a trade-off leads to a substantial improvement in communication cost. Moreover, we provide theoretical insight into our framework and establish a novel link between training-by-sampling and random convex geometry.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_14246
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Trading-off Accuracy and Communication Cost in Federated Learning
Villani, Mattia Jacopo
Natale, Emanuele
Mallmann-Trenn, Frederik
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Leveraging the training-by-pruning paradigm introduced by Zhou et al. and Isik et al. introduced a federated learning protocol that achieves a 34-fold reduction in communication cost. We achieve a compression improvements of orders of orders of magnitude over the state-of-the-art. The central idea of our framework is to encode the network weights $\vec w$ by a the vector of trainable parameters $\vec p$, such that $\vec w = Q\cdot \vec p$ where $Q$ is a carefully-generate sparse random matrix (that remains fixed throughout training). In such framework, the previous work of Zhou et al. [NeurIPS'19] is retrieved when $Q$ is diagonal and $\vec p$ has the same dimension of $\vec w$. We instead show that $\vec p$ can effectively be chosen much smaller than $\vec w$, while retaining the same accuracy at the price of a decrease of the sparsity of $Q$. Since server and clients only need to share $\vec p$, such a trade-off leads to a substantial improvement in communication cost. Moreover, we provide theoretical insight into our framework and establish a novel link between training-by-sampling and random convex geometry.
title Trading-off Accuracy and Communication Cost in Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14246