论文标题
与异步和异质客户更新的联合优化的一般理论
A General Theory for Federated Optimization with Asynchronous and Heterogeneous Clients Updates
论文作者
论文摘要
我们提出了一个新颖的框架，以研究异步联合学习优化，并在梯度更新中延迟。我们的理论框架通过引入随机聚合权重来表示客户更新时间的可变性，从而扩展了标准的FedAvg聚合方案，例如异质硬件功能。我们的形式主义适用于客户具有异质数据集并至少执行随机梯度下降（SGD）的一步。我们证明了这种方案的收敛性，并为相关最小值提供了足够的条件，使其成为联合问题的最佳选择。我们表明，我们的一般框架适用于现有的优化方案，包括集中学习，FedAvg，异步FedAvg和FedBuff。这里提供的理论允许绘制有意义的指南，以设计在异质条件下联合学习实验的指南。特别是，我们在这项工作中开发了FedFix，这是FedAvg的新型扩展，从而实现了有效的异步联合训练，同时保留了同步聚合的收敛稳定性。我们在一系列实验上凭经验证明了我们的理论，表明异步FedAvg以稳定性为代价导致快速收敛，我们最终证明了FedIx比同步和异步FedAvg的改善。
We propose a novel framework to study asynchronous federated learning optimization with delays in gradient updates. Our theoretical framework extends the standard FedAvg aggregation scheme by introducing stochastic aggregation weights to represent the variability of the clients update time, due for example to heterogeneous hardware capabilities. Our formalism applies to the general federated setting where clients have heterogeneous datasets and perform at least one step of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We demonstrate convergence for such a scheme and provide sufficient conditions for the related minimum to be the optimum of the federated problem. We show that our general framework applies to existing optimization schemes including centralized learning, FedAvg, asynchronous FedAvg, and FedBuff. The theory here provided allows drawing meaningful guidelines for designing a federated learning experiment in heterogeneous conditions. In particular, we develop in this work FedFix, a novel extension of FedAvg enabling efficient asynchronous federated training while preserving the convergence stability of synchronous aggregation. We empirically demonstrate our theory on a series of experiments showing that asynchronous FedAvg leads to fast convergence at the expense of stability, and we finally demonstrate the improvements of FedFix over synchronous and asynchronous FedAvg.
