Accelerated Federated Learning with Decoupled Adaptive Optimization
This work addresses the problem of slow and inconsistent convergence in federated learning for edge computing applications, representing an incremental improvement with a novel theoretical approach.
The paper tackled the lack of theoretical principles for adaptive optimization in federated learning by developing FedDA, a method based on ordinary differential equations that decouples momentum to accelerate training, achieving faster convergence with concrete speed-up metrics reported.
The federated learning (FL) framework enables edge clients to collaboratively learn a shared inference model while keeping privacy of training data on clients. Recently, many heuristics efforts have been made to generalize centralized adaptive optimization methods, such as SGDM, Adam, AdaGrad, etc., to federated settings for improving convergence and accuracy. However, there is still a paucity of theoretical principles on where to and how to design and utilize adaptive optimization methods in federated settings. This work aims to develop novel adaptive optimization methods for FL from the perspective of dynamics of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). First, an analytic framework is established to build a connection between federated optimization methods and decompositions of ODEs of corresponding centralized optimizers. Second, based on this analytic framework, a momentum decoupling adaptive optimization method, FedDA, is developed to fully utilize the global momentum on each local iteration and accelerate the training convergence. Last but not least, full batch gradients are utilized to mimic centralized optimization in the end of the training process to ensure the convergence and overcome the possible inconsistency caused by adaptive optimization methods.