TurboSVM-FL: Boosting Federated Learning through SVM Aggregation for Lazy Clients
This addresses the problem of slow convergence in cross-device federated learning for lazy clients with limited resources, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles slow convergence in federated learning due to data heterogeneity by proposing TurboSVM-FL, a novel aggregation strategy that uses support vector machines for selective aggregation and regularization, resulting in significantly faster convergence, reduced communication rounds, and improved test metrics like accuracy and F1 score on datasets such as FEMNIST and CelebA.
Federated learning is a distributed collaborative machine learning paradigm that has gained strong momentum in recent years. In federated learning, a central server periodically coordinates models with clients and aggregates the models trained locally by clients without necessitating access to local data. Despite its potential, the implementation of federated learning continues to encounter several challenges, predominantly the slow convergence that is largely due to data heterogeneity. The slow convergence becomes particularly problematic in cross-device federated learning scenarios where clients may be strongly limited by computing power and storage space, and hence counteracting methods that induce additional computation or memory cost on the client side such as auxiliary objective terms and larger training iterations can be impractical. In this paper, we propose a novel federated aggregation strategy, TurboSVM-FL, that poses no additional computation burden on the client side and can significantly accelerate convergence for federated classification task, especially when clients are "lazy" and train their models solely for few epochs for next global aggregation. TurboSVM-FL extensively utilizes support vector machine to conduct selective aggregation and max-margin spread-out regularization on class embeddings. We evaluate TurboSVM-FL on multiple datasets including FEMNIST, CelebA, and Shakespeare using user-independent validation with non-iid data distribution. Our results show that TurboSVM-FL can significantly outperform existing popular algorithms on convergence rate and reduce communication rounds while delivering better test metrics including accuracy, F1 score, and MCC.