Roughness-Informed Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Partohaghighi, Mohammad, Marcia, Roummel, West, Bruce J., Chen, YangQuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Partohaghighi, Mohammad
Marcia, Roummel
West, Bruce J.
Chen, YangQuan
author_facet Partohaghighi, Mohammad
Marcia, Roummel
West, Bruce J.
Chen, YangQuan
contents Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy, yet faces challenges in non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) settings due to client drift, which impairs convergence. We propose RI-FedAvg, a novel FL algorithm that mitigates client drift by incorporating a Roughness Index (RI)-based regularization term into the local objective, adaptively penalizing updates based on the fluctuations of local loss landscapes. This paper introduces RI-FedAvg, leveraging the RI to quantify the roughness of high-dimensional loss functions, ensuring robust optimization in heterogeneous settings. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis for non-convex objectives, establishing that RI-FedAvg converges to a stationary point under standard assumptions. Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that RI-FedAvg outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including FedAvg, FedProx, FedDyn, SCAFFOLD, and DP-FedAvg, achieving higher accuracy and faster convergence in non-IID scenarios. Our results highlight RI-FedAvg's potential to enhance the robustness and efficiency of federated learning in practical, heterogeneous environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_10595
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Roughness-Informed Federated Learning
Partohaghighi, Mohammad
Marcia, Roummel
West, Bruce J.
Chen, YangQuan
Machine Learning
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy, yet faces challenges in non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) settings due to client drift, which impairs convergence. We propose RI-FedAvg, a novel FL algorithm that mitigates client drift by incorporating a Roughness Index (RI)-based regularization term into the local objective, adaptively penalizing updates based on the fluctuations of local loss landscapes. This paper introduces RI-FedAvg, leveraging the RI to quantify the roughness of high-dimensional loss functions, ensuring robust optimization in heterogeneous settings. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis for non-convex objectives, establishing that RI-FedAvg converges to a stationary point under standard assumptions. Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that RI-FedAvg outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including FedAvg, FedProx, FedDyn, SCAFFOLD, and DP-FedAvg, achieving higher accuracy and faster convergence in non-IID scenarios. Our results highlight RI-FedAvg's potential to enhance the robustness and efficiency of federated learning in practical, heterogeneous environments.
title Roughness-Informed Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10595