Personalized Collaborative Learning with Affinity-Based Variance Reduction
This addresses the challenge of balancing collaboration and personalization for heterogeneous agents in distributed learning, offering a novel adaptive solution.
The paper tackles the problem of multi-agent learning where agents need personalized solutions while collaborating, proposing a framework that adapts to unknown heterogeneity levels and reduces sample complexity by a factor of max{n^{-1}, δ} compared to independent learning.
Multi-agent learning faces a fundamental tension: leveraging distributed collaboration without sacrificing the personalization needed for diverse agents. This tension intensifies when aiming for full personalization while adapting to unknown heterogeneity levels -- gaining collaborative speedup when agents are similar, without performance degradation when they are different. Embracing the challenge, we propose personalized collaborative learning (PCL), a novel framework for heterogeneous agents to collaboratively learn personalized solutions with seamless adaptivity. Through carefully designed bias correction and importance correction mechanisms, our method AffPCL robustly handles both environment and objective heterogeneity. We prove that AffPCL reduces sample complexity over independent learning by a factor of $\max\{n^{-1}, δ\}$, where $n$ is the number of agents and $δ\in[0,1]$ measures their heterogeneity. This affinity-based acceleration automatically interpolates between the linear speedup of federated learning in homogeneous settings and the baseline of independent learning, without requiring prior knowledge of the system. Our analysis further reveals that an agent may obtain linear speedup even by collaborating with arbitrarily dissimilar agents, unveiling new insights into personalization and collaboration in the high heterogeneity regime.