Optimal Importance Sampling for Federated Learning
This work addresses efficiency in federated learning for distributed systems, but it is incremental as it builds on FedAvg with specific sampling optimizations.
The paper tackled the problem of uniform sampling in federated learning by deriving optimal importance sampling strategies for agent and data selection, showing that non-uniform sampling without replacement improves FedAvg performance, with experiments on regression and classification tasks.
Federated learning involves a mixture of centralized and decentralized processing tasks, where a server regularly selects a sample of the agents and these in turn sample their local data to compute stochastic gradients for their learning updates. This process runs continually. The sampling of both agents and data is generally uniform; however, in this work we consider non-uniform sampling. We derive optimal importance sampling strategies for both agent and data selection and show that non-uniform sampling without replacement improves the performance of the original FedAvg algorithm. We run experiments on a regression and classification problem to illustrate the theoretical results.