FedP3: Federated Personalized and Privacy-friendly Network Pruning under Model Heterogeneity

The interest in federated learning has surged in recent research due to its unique ability to train a global model using privacy-secured information held locally on each client. This paper pays particular attention to the issue of client-side model heterogeneity, a pervasive challenge in the practical implementation of FL that escalates its complexity. Assuming a scenario where each client possesses varied memory storage, processing capabilities and network bandwidth - a phenomenon referred to as system heterogeneity - there is a pressing need to customize a unique model for each client. In response to this, we present an effective and adaptable federated framework FedP3, representing Federated Personalized and Privacy-friendly network Pruning, tailored for model heterogeneity scenarios. Our proposed methodology can incorporate and adapt well-established techniques to its specific instances. We offer a theoretical interpretation of FedP3 and its locally differential-private variant, DP-FedP3, and theoretically validate their efficiencies.

FedComLoc: Communication-Efficient Distributed Training of Sparse and Quantized Models

Federated Learning (FL) has garnered increasing attention due to its unique characteristic of allowing heterogeneous clients to process their private data locally and interact with a central server, while being respectful of privacy. A critical bottleneck in FL is the communication cost. A pivotal strategy to mitigate this burden is \emph{Local Training}, which involves running multiple local stochastic gradient descent iterations between communication phases. Our work is inspired by the innovative \emph{Scaffnew} algorithm, which has considerably advanced the reduction of communication complexity in FL. We introduce FedComLoc (Federated Compressed and Local Training), integrating practical and effective compression into \emph{Scaffnew} to further enhance communication efficiency. Extensive experiments, using the popular TopK compressor and quantization, demonstrate its prowess in substantially reducing communication overheads in heterogeneous settings.

Streamlining in the Riemannian Realm: Efficient Riemannian Optimization with Loopless Variance Reduction

In this study, we investigate stochastic optimization on Riemannian manifolds, focusing on the crucial variance reduction mechanism used in both Euclidean and Riemannian settings. Riemannian variance-reduced methods usually involve a double-loop structure, computing a full gradient at the start of each loop. Determining the optimal inner loop length is challenging in practice, as it depends on strong convexity or smoothness constants, which are often unknown or hard to estimate. Motivated by Euclidean methods, we introduce the Riemannian Loopless SVRG (R-LSVRG) and PAGE (R-PAGE) methods. These methods replace the outer loop with probabilistic gradient computation triggered by a coin flip in each iteration, ensuring simpler proofs, efficient hyperparameter selection, and sharp convergence guarantees. Using R-PAGE as a framework for non-convex Riemannian optimization, we demonstrate its applicability to various important settings. For example, we derive Riemannian MARINA (R-MARINA) for distributed settings with communication compression, providing the best theoretical communication complexity guarantees for non-convex distributed optimization over Riemannian manifolds. Experimental results support our theoretical findings.

LoCoDL: Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning with Local Training and Compression

In Distributed optimization and Learning, and even more in the modern framework of federated learning, communication, which is slow and costly, is critical. We introduce LoCoDL, a communication-efficient algorithm that leverages the two popular and effective techniques of Local training, which reduces the communication frequency, and Compression, in which short bitstreams are sent instead of full-dimensional vectors of floats. LoCoDL works with a large class of unbiased compressors that includes widely-used sparsification and quantization methods. LoCoDL provably benefits from local training and compression and enjoys a doubly-accelerated communication complexity, with respect to the condition number of the functions and the model dimension, in the general heterogenous regime with strongly convex functions. This is confirmed in practice, with LoCoDL outperforming existing algorithms.

Error Feedback Reloaded: From Quadratic to Arithmetic Mean of Smoothness Constants

Error Feedback (EF) is a highly popular and immensely effective mechanism for fixing convergence issues which arise in distributed training methods (such as distributed GD or SGD) when these are enhanced with greedy communication compression techniques such as TopK. While EF was proposed almost a decade ago (Seide et al., 2014), and despite concentrated effort by the community to advance the theoretical understanding of this mechanism, there is still a lot to explore. In this work we study a modern form of error feedback called EF21 (Richtarik et al., 2021) which offers the currently best-known theoretical guarantees, under the weakest assumptions, and also works well in practice. In particular, while the theoretical communication complexity of EF21 depends on the quadratic mean of certain smoothness parameters, we improve this dependence to their arithmetic mean, which is always smaller, and can be substantially smaller, especially in heterogeneous data regimes. We take the reader on a journey of our discovery process. Starting with the idea of applying EF21 to an equivalent reformulation of the underlying problem which (unfortunately) requires (often impractical) machine cloning, we continue to the discovery of a new weighted version of EF21 which can (fortunately) be executed without any cloning, and finally circle back to an improved analysis of the original EF21 method. While this development applies to the simplest form of EF21, our approach naturally extends to more elaborate variants involving stochastic gradients and partial participation. Further, our technique improves the best-known theory of EF21 in the rare features regime (Richtarik et al., 2023). Finally, we validate our theoretical findings with suitable experiments.

Improving the Worst-Case Bidirectional Communication Complexity for Nonconvex Distributed Optimization under Function Similarity

Effective communication between the server and workers plays a key role in distributed optimization. In this paper, we focus on optimizing the server-to-worker communication, uncovering inefficiencies in prevalent downlink compression approaches. Considering first the pure setup where the uplink communication costs are negligible, we introduce MARINA-P, a novel method for downlink compression, employing a collection of correlated compressors. Theoretical analyses demonstrates that MARINA-P with permutation compressors can achieve a server-to-worker communication complexity improving with the number of workers, thus being provably superior to existing algorithms. We further show that MARINA-P can serve as a starting point for extensions such as methods supporting bidirectional compression. We introduce M3, a method combining MARINA-P with uplink compression and a momentum step, achieving bidirectional compression with provable improvements in total communication complexity as the number of workers increases. Theoretical findings align closely with empirical experiments, underscoring the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Shadowheart SGD: Distributed Asynchronous SGD with Optimal Time Complexity Under Arbitrary Computation and Communication Heterogeneity

We consider nonconvex stochastic optimization problems in the asynchronous centralized distributed setup where the communication times from workers to a server can not be ignored, and the computation and communication times are potentially different for all workers. Using an unbiassed compression technique, we develop a new method-Shadowheart SGD-that provably improves the time complexities of all previous centralized methods. Moreover, we show that the time complexity of Shadowheart SGD is optimal in the family of centralized methods with compressed communication. We also consider the bidirectional setup, where broadcasting from the server to the workers is non-negligible, and develop a corresponding method.

Correlated Quantization for Faster Nonconvex Distributed Optimization

Quantization (Alistarh et al., 2017) is an important (stochastic) compression technique that reduces the volume of transmitted bits during each communication round in distributed model training. Suresh et al. (2022) introduce correlated quantizers and show their advantages over independent counterparts by analyzing distributed SGD communication complexity. We analyze the forefront distributed non-convex optimization algorithm MARINA (Gorbunov et al., 2022) utilizing the proposed correlated quantizers and show that it outperforms the original MARINA and distributed SGD of Suresh et al. (2022) with regard to the communication complexity. We significantly refine the original analysis of MARINA without any additional assumptions using the weighted Hessian variance (Tyurin et al., 2022), and then we expand the theoretical framework of MARINA to accommodate a substantially broader range of potentially correlated and biased compressors, thus dilating the applicability of the method beyond the conventional independent unbiased compressor setup. Extensive experimental results corroborate our theoretical findings.

Kimad: Adaptive Gradient Compression with Bandwidth Awareness

In distributed training, communication often emerges as a bottleneck. In response, we introduce Kimad, a solution that offers adaptive gradient compression. By consistently monitoring bandwidth, Kimad refines compression ratios to match specific neural network layer requirements. Our exhaustive tests and proofs confirm Kimad's outstanding performance, establishing it as a benchmark in adaptive compression for distributed deep learning.

MAST: Model-Agnostic Sparsified Training

We introduce a novel optimization problem formulation that departs from the conventional way of minimizing machine learning model loss as a black-box function. Unlike traditional formulations, the proposed approach explicitly incorporates an initially pre-trained model and random sketch operators, allowing for sparsification of both the model and gradient during training. We establish insightful properties of the proposed objective function and highlight its connections to the standard formulation. Furthermore, we present several variants of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method adapted to the new problem formulation, including SGD with general sampling, a distributed version, and SGD with variance reduction techniques. We achieve tighter convergence rates and relax assumptions, bridging the gap between theoretical principles and practical applications, covering several important techniques such as Dropout and Sparse training. This work presents promising opportunities to enhance the theoretical understanding of model training through a sparsification-aware optimization approach.