AFL: A Single-Round Analytic Approach for Federated Learning with Pre-trained Models
This addresses efficiency and scalability challenges in federated learning for distributed systems, though it builds on existing analytic learning techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of high communication overhead and slow convergence in federated learning by introducing analytic federated learning (AFL), which uses closed-form solutions to enable single-round aggregation and one-epoch local training, achieving competitive performance across various settings including extremely non-IID data and large numbers of clients (e.g., ≥1000).
In this paper, we introduce analytic federated learning (AFL), a new training paradigm that brings analytical (i.e., closed-form) solutions to the federated learning (FL) with pre-trained models. Our AFL draws inspiration from analytic learning -- a gradient-free technique that trains neural networks with analytical solutions in one epoch. In the local client training stage, the AFL facilitates a one-epoch training, eliminating the necessity for multi-epoch updates. In the aggregation stage, we derive an absolute aggregation (AA) law. This AA law allows a single-round aggregation, reducing heavy communication overhead and achieving fast convergence by removing the need for multiple aggregation rounds. More importantly, the AFL exhibits a property that \textit{invariance to data partitioning}, meaning that regardless of how the full dataset is distributed among clients, the aggregated result remains identical. This could spawn various potentials, such as data heterogeneity invariance and client-number invariance. We conduct experiments across various FL settings including extremely non-IID ones, and scenarios with a large number of clients (e.g., $\ge 1000$). In all these settings, our AFL constantly performs competitively while existing FL techniques encounter various obstacles. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ZHUANGHP/Analytic-federated-learning.