Convergence Analysis of Asynchronous Federated Learning with Gradient Compression for Non-Convex Optimization

Gradient compression is an effective technique for reducing communication costs in federated learning (FL), and error feedback (EF) is usually adopted to remedy the compression errors. However, there remains a lack of systematic study on these techniques in asynchronous FL. In this paper, we fill this gap by analyzing the convergence behaviors of FL under different frameworks. We firstly consider a basic asynchronous FL framework AsynFL, and provide an improved convergence analysis that relies on fewer assumptions and yields a superior convergence rate than prior studies. Then, we consider a variant framework with gradient compression, AsynFLC. We show sufficient conditions for its convergence to the optimum, indicating the interaction between asynchronous delay and compression rate. Our analysis also demonstrates that asynchronous delay amplifies the variance caused by compression, thereby hindering convergence, and such an impact is exacerbated by high data heterogeneity. Furthermore, we study the convergence of AsynFLC-EF, the framework that further integrates EF. We prove that EF can effectively reduce the variance of gradient estimation despite asynchronous delay, which enables AsynFLC-EF to match the convergence rate of AsynFL. We also show that the impact of asynchronous delay on EF is limited to slowing down the higher-order convergence term. Experimental results substantiate our analytical findings very well.