SA-PEF: Step-Ahead Partial Error Feedback for Efficient Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Redie, Dawit Kiros, Arablouei, Reza, Werner, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866917527488036864
author Redie, Dawit Kiros
Arablouei, Reza
Werner, Stefan
author_facet Redie, Dawit Kiros
Arablouei, Reza
Werner, Stefan
contents Biased gradient compression with error feedback (EF) reduces communication in federated learning (FL), but under non-IID data, the residual error can decay slowly, causing gradient mismatch and stalled progress in the early rounds. We propose step-ahead partial error feedback (SA-PEF), which integrates step-ahead (SA) correction with partial error feedback (PEF). SA-PEF recovers EF when the step-ahead coefficient $α=0$ and step-ahead EF (SAEF) when $α=1$. For non-convex objectives and $δ$-contractive compressors, we establish a second-moment bound and a residual recursion that guarantee convergence to stationarity under heterogeneous data and partial client participation. The resulting rates match standard non-convex Fed-SGD guarantees up to constant factors, achieving $O((η,η_0TR)^{-1})$ convergence to a variance/heterogeneity floor with a fixed inner step size. Our analysis reveals a step-ahead-controlled residual contraction $ρ_r$ that explains the observed acceleration in the early training phase. To balance SAEF's rapid warm-up with EF's long-term stability, we select $α$ near its theory-predicted optimum. Experiments across diverse architectures and datasets show that SA-PEF consistently reaches target accuracy faster than EF.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_20738
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SA-PEF: Step-Ahead Partial Error Feedback for Efficient Federated Learning
Redie, Dawit Kiros
Arablouei, Reza
Werner, Stefan
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Signal Processing
Optimization and Control
Biased gradient compression with error feedback (EF) reduces communication in federated learning (FL), but under non-IID data, the residual error can decay slowly, causing gradient mismatch and stalled progress in the early rounds. We propose step-ahead partial error feedback (SA-PEF), which integrates step-ahead (SA) correction with partial error feedback (PEF). SA-PEF recovers EF when the step-ahead coefficient $α=0$ and step-ahead EF (SAEF) when $α=1$. For non-convex objectives and $δ$-contractive compressors, we establish a second-moment bound and a residual recursion that guarantee convergence to stationarity under heterogeneous data and partial client participation. The resulting rates match standard non-convex Fed-SGD guarantees up to constant factors, achieving $O((η,η_0TR)^{-1})$ convergence to a variance/heterogeneity floor with a fixed inner step size. Our analysis reveals a step-ahead-controlled residual contraction $ρ_r$ that explains the observed acceleration in the early training phase. To balance SAEF's rapid warm-up with EF's long-term stability, we select $α$ near its theory-predicted optimum. Experiments across diverse architectures and datasets show that SA-PEF consistently reaches target accuracy faster than EF.
title SA-PEF: Step-Ahead Partial Error Feedback for Efficient Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Signal Processing
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20738