arXiv Machine Learning

Communication-Efficient Agnostic Federated Learning via Faster Convergence and Compression

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Revisiting Distributed Sign-Based Variance Reduction

The paper addresses bias introduced by aggregating local signs in distributed sign-based variance reduction methods, which hampers optimal convergence rates. By proposing an unbiased compression of recursive gradient increments to track the global gradient at the server, the authors achieve optimal convergence rates for both nonconvex stochastic and finite-sum optimization. They provide specific rate bounds for α-norms and demonstrate matching sample complexities to centralized settings for finite-sum problems.

By Wei Jiang, Zechao Li, Lijun Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Federated Lightweight Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2607. 18343v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning is bottlenecked by communication: FedAvg and pseudo-gradient schemes transmit a payload that scales with the model, and gradient compression shrinks it by only a constant factor.

By Radhakrishna Achanta, Will Reed
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 3

SCAPE: Accurate and Efficient LLM Training with Extreme Sparse Communication

arXiv:2607. 01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication increasingly dominates the cost of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, especially under data-parallel and sharded training schemes, where gradient synchronization and parameter reconstruction overhead increase with model size and system scale.

By Mingkai Zheng, Junlin Chen, Haotian Xie, Zhao Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

SPADE-DFL: Communication-Efficient Decentralized Federated Learning via Derivative-Free Linearized ADMM

SPADE-DFL is a communication‑efficient decentralized federated learning algorithm that uses a primal–dual method to allow the number of local function‑value updates between neighbor exchanges to increase with the computation budget while maintaining non‑private convergence rates. For smooth nonconvex objectives, it achieves a time‑averaged stationarity and consensus bound of ≠O(T−1/3) with only ≠Theta(T−2/3) communication rounds, where T is the number of local updates per client. The method also supports client‑level differential privacy by isolating data‑dependent increments, proving privacy for the full interactive transcript and quantifying the resulting optimization error, and demonstrates higher mean test accuracy than existing decentralized learning methods on four classification tasks.

By Mengli Wei, Mengkai Zhu, Jiawen Chen, Wenwu Yu, Duxin Che
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

An Agnostic Sample Compression Scheme for Squared Loss of Near-Linear Size in the Fat-Shattering Dimension

arXiv:2609. 29696v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We construct, for every function class $\mathcal{F}\subseteq[0,1]^{\mathcal{X}}$ and every accuracy $0<\alpha\le 1$, an agnostic sample compression scheme for the empirical squared loss: for every finite sample $S\in(\mathcal{X}\times[0,1])^m$ with arbitrary (noisy) labels, the scheme stores at most $O(\mathrm{fat}(\mathcal{F},c'\alpha)\cdot\log^3(2/\alpha))$ original labeled examples and auxiliary bits, independent of the sample size $m$, and reconstructs a function $\hat f$ with $L_2(\hat f,S)\le\inf_{f\in\mathcal{F}}L_2(f,S)+\alpha$.

By Guangjian Zhang