arXiv research

Data parallelism can boost the training speed of convolutional neural networks (CNN), but could suffer from significant communication costs caused by gradient aggregation. To alleviate this problem, several scalar quantization techniques have been developed to compress the gradients. But these techniques could perform …

Paper studies fundamental limits of communication in distributed learning.

The present paper develops a novel aggregated gradient approach for distributed machine learning that adaptively compresses the gradient communication. The key idea is to first quantize the computed gradients, and then skip less informative quantized gradient communications by reusing outdated gradients. Quantizing and…

Non-affine aggregation rules cannot preserve monotonicity in convex learning.

The incremental aggregated gradient algorithm is popular in network optimization and machine learning research. However, the current convergence results require the objective function to be strongly convex. And the existing convergence rates are also limited to linear convergence. Due to the mathematical techniques, th…

Policy gradient methods with aggregated states can achieve better performance than approximate policy iteration.

LASG improves communication efficiency in distributed learning.

Secure Aggregation protocols allow a collection of mutually distrust parties, each holding a private value, to collaboratively compute the sum of those values without revealing the values themselves. We consider training a deep neural network in the Federated Learning model, using distributed stochastic gradient descen…

This paper presents a new class of gradient methods for distributed machine learning that adaptively skip the gradient calculations to learn with reduced communication and computation. Simple rules are designed to detect slowly-varying gradients and, therefore, trigger the reuse of outdated gradients. The resultant gra…

In this paper, we address a problem of machine learning system vulnerability to adversarial attacks. We propose and investigate a Key based Diversified Aggregation (KDA) mechanism as a defense strategy. The KDA assumes that the attacker (i) knows the architecture of classifier and the used defense strategy, (ii) has an…

We propose a novel robust aggregation rule for distributed synchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent~(SGD) under a general Byzantine failure model. The attackers can arbitrarily manipulate the data transferred between the servers and the workers in the parameter server~(PS) architecture. We prove the Byzantine resilience…

Federated Learning speeds up speech recognition training by 7x and reduces error rate by 6%.

We propose a new algorithm for finite sum optimization which we call the curvature-aided incremental aggregated gradient (CIAG) method. Motivated by the problem of training a classifier for a d-dimensional problem, where the number of training data is $m$ and $m \gg d \gg 1$, the CIAG method seeks to accelerate increme…

The paper compares aggregated data labels in curated and random bags for machine learning models.

We analyze a fast incremental aggregated gradient method for optimizing nonconvex problems of the form $\min_x \sum_i f_i(x)$. Specifically, we analyze the SAGA algorithm within an Incremental First-order Oracle framework, and show that it converges to a stationary point provably faster than both gradient descent and s…

FedBuff improves federated learning scalability with asynchronous updates.

PTOPOFL uses topological descriptors to protect privacy in federated learning.

Federated learning (FL) aims to train machine learning models in the decentralized system consisting of an enormous amount of smart edge devices. Federated averaging (FedAvg), the fundamental algorithm in FL settings, proposes on-device training and model aggregation to avoid the potential heavy communication costs and…

We study a new aggregation operator for gradients coming from a mini-batch for stochastic gradient (SG) methods that allows a significant speed-up in the case of sparse optimization problems. We call this method AdaBatch and it only requires a few lines of code change compared to regular mini-batch SGD algorithms. We p…

This paper addresses privacy in federated learning with wireless clients and base stations.

This paper optimizes MDP policies for efficient state aggregation.

GRAIN: Group Aggregation via Min-Norm Objective

Recent advances in machine learning have largely benefited from the massive accessible training data. However, large-scale data sharing has raised great privacy concerns. In this work, we propose a novel privacy-preserving data Generative model based on the PATE framework (G-PATE), aiming to train a scalable differenti…

The paper proposes a method to learn differentially private variational autoencoders with term-wise gradient aggregation.

To improve the resilience of distributed training to worst-case, or Byzantine node failures, several recent approaches have replaced gradient averaging with robust aggregation methods. Such techniques can have high computational costs, often quadratic in the number of compute nodes, and only have limited robustness gua…

Federated learning is a distributed learning method to train a shared model by aggregating the locally-computed gradient updates. In federated learning, bandwidth and privacy are two main concerns of gradient updates transmission. This paper proposes an end-to-end encrypted neural network for gradient updates transmiss…

This paper introduces a family of local feature aggregation functions and a novel method to estimate their parameters, such that they generate optimal representations for classification (or any task that can be expressed as a cost function minimization problem). To achieve that, we compose the local feature aggregation…

We propose three new robust aggregation rules for distributed synchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent~(SGD) under a general Byzantine failure model. The attackers can arbitrarily manipulate the data transferred between the servers and the workers in the parameter server~(PS) architecture. We prove the Byzantine resilie…

A framework for federated adversarial learning with convergence analysis.

Two novel algorithms improve distributed machine learning in the presence of Byzantine adversaries.

Robust algorithm for distributed optimization resistant to Byzantine failures.

We consider the problem of distributed statistical machine learning in adversarial settings, where some unknown and time-varying subset of working machines may be compromised and behave arbitrarily to prevent an accurate model from being learned. This setting captures the potential adversarial attacks faced by Federate…

We focus on the commonly used synchronous Gradient Descent paradigm for large-scale distributed learning, for which there has been a growing interest to develop efficient and robust gradient aggregation strategies that overcome two key system bottlenecks: communication bandwidth and stragglers' delays. In particular, R…

Proposes a method for private aggregation in heterogeneous federated learning.

DeeperGCN tackles deep GCNs by overcoming vanishing gradient and over-smoothing issues.

In this paper, we explore a general Aggregated Gradient Langevin Dynamics framework (AGLD) for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. We investigate the nonasymptotic convergence of AGLD with a unified analysis for different data accessing (e.g. random access, cyclic access and random reshuffle) and snapshot upd…

FedNAG improves federated learning accuracy and reduces training time.

This paper deals with distributed finite-sum optimization for learning over networks in the presence of malicious Byzantine attacks. To cope with such attacks, most resilient approaches so far combine stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with different robust aggregation rules. However, the sizeable SGD-induced stochastic…

More frequent model updates in FL increase generalization error.

Meta-strategy learns tuning parameters for online learning methods.

This paper accelerates distributed convex optimization by mitigating ill-conditioning issues.

New Muon and Momo variants improve neural network optimization robustness.

Randomized gradient-based ensemble improves prediction accuracy.

Proposes a method to improve Byzantine-robustness in compressed federated learning.

Momentum is a simple and widely used trick which allows gradient-based optimizers to pick up speed along low curvature directions. Its performance depends crucially on a damping coefficient $β$. Large $β$ values can potentially deliver much larger speedups, but are prone to oscillations and instability; hence one typic…

New method improves training stochastic neural networks with tighter guarantees.

HCBM improves deep learning explainability by non-linear concept aggregation.

Feedback alignment methods need to be evaluated for accuracy and gradient cosine similarity.