Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bhattacharyya, Shamik, Kalaimani, Rachel Kalpana
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01793
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911353783975936
author Bhattacharyya, Shamik
Kalaimani, Rachel Kalpana
author_facet Bhattacharyya, Shamik
Kalaimani, Rachel Kalpana
contents Federated learning is a privacy-focused approach towards machine learning where models are trained on client devices with locally available data and aggregated at a central server. However, the dependence on a single central server is challenging in the case of a large number of clients and even poses the risk of a single point of failure. To address these critical limitations of scalability and fault-tolerance, we present a distributed approach to federated learning comprising multiple servers with inter-server communication capabilities. While providing a fully decentralized approach, the designed framework retains the core federated learning structure where each server is associated with a disjoint set of clients with server-client communication capabilities. We propose a novel DFL (Distributed Federated Learning) algorithm which uses alternating periods of local training on the client data followed by global training among servers. We show that the DFL algorithm, under a suitable choice of parameters, ensures that all the servers converge to a common model value within a small tolerance of the ideal model, thus exhibiting effective integration of local and global training models. Finally, we illustrate our theoretical claims through numerical simulations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_01793
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distributed Federated Learning by Alternating Periods of Training
Bhattacharyya, Shamik
Kalaimani, Rachel Kalpana
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Federated learning is a privacy-focused approach towards machine learning where models are trained on client devices with locally available data and aggregated at a central server. However, the dependence on a single central server is challenging in the case of a large number of clients and even poses the risk of a single point of failure. To address these critical limitations of scalability and fault-tolerance, we present a distributed approach to federated learning comprising multiple servers with inter-server communication capabilities. While providing a fully decentralized approach, the designed framework retains the core federated learning structure where each server is associated with a disjoint set of clients with server-client communication capabilities. We propose a novel DFL (Distributed Federated Learning) algorithm which uses alternating periods of local training on the client data followed by global training among servers. We show that the DFL algorithm, under a suitable choice of parameters, ensures that all the servers converge to a common model value within a small tolerance of the ideal model, thus exhibiting effective integration of local and global training models. Finally, we illustrate our theoretical claims through numerical simulations.
title Distributed Federated Learning by Alternating Periods of Training
topic Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01793