Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Detailed Answer
Quick Answer
Concise responses based on abstracts only
Detailed Answer
Well-researched responses based on abstracts and relevant paper content.
Custom Instructions Pro
Preferences or requirements that you'd like Emergent Mind to consider when generating responses
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash 37 tok/s
Gemini 2.5 Pro 41 tok/s Pro
GPT-5 Medium 10 tok/s Pro
GPT-5 High 15 tok/s Pro
GPT-4o 84 tok/s Pro
Kimi K2 198 tok/s Pro
GPT OSS 120B 448 tok/s Pro
Claude Sonnet 4 31 tok/s Pro
2000 character limit reached

$z$-SignFedAvg: A Unified Stochastic Sign-based Compression for Federated Learning (2302.02589v1)

Published 6 Feb 2023 in cs.LG and stat.ML

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising privacy-preserving distributed learning paradigm but suffers from high communication cost when training large-scale machine learning models. Sign-based methods, such as SignSGD \cite{bernstein2018signsgd}, have been proposed as a biased gradient compression technique for reducing the communication cost. However, sign-based algorithms could diverge under heterogeneous data, which thus motivated the development of advanced techniques, such as the error-feedback method and stochastic sign-based compression, to fix this issue. Nevertheless, these methods still suffer from slower convergence rates. Besides, none of them allows multiple local SGD updates like FedAvg \cite{mcmahan2017communication}. In this paper, we propose a novel noisy perturbation scheme with a general symmetric noise distribution for sign-based compression, which not only allows one to flexibly control the tradeoff between gradient bias and convergence performance, but also provides a unified viewpoint to existing stochastic sign-based methods. More importantly, the unified noisy perturbation scheme enables the development of the very first sign-based FedAvg algorithm ($z$-SignFedAvg) to accelerate the convergence. Theoretically, we show that $z$-SignFedAvg achieves a faster convergence rate than existing sign-based methods and, under the uniformly distributed noise, can enjoy the same convergence rate as its uncompressed counterpart. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the $z$-SignFedAvg can achieve competitive empirical performance on real datasets and outperforms existing schemes.

Citations (11)

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.

List To Do Tasks Checklist Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Collections

Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.

Lightbulb On Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Continue Learning

We haven't generated follow-up questions for this paper yet.

X Twitter Logo Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com