15 accepted papers
In cross-device federated learning (FL) with millions of mobile clients, only a small subset of clients participate in training in every communication round, and Federated Averaging (FedAvg) is the most popular algorithm in practice. Existing analyses of FedAvg usually assume the participating clie…
We study a federated version of multi-objective optimization (MOO), where a single model is trained to optimize multiple objective functions. MOO has been extensively studied in the centralized setting but is less explored in federated or distributed settings. We propose FedCMOO, a novel communicati…
We study high-probability convergence in online learning, in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy tails, a general framework of nonlinear SGD methods is considered, subsuming several popular nonlinearities like sign, quantization, component-wise and joint clipping. In our work the…
This work considers a high-dimensional decentralized optimization problem where computing the full gradient is prohibitively expensive. This is a common issue in Partial Difference Equation (PDE)-constrained optimization and some machine learning applications. Stochastic subspace descent (SSD) solve…
Federated Learning (FL) enables edge devices or clients to collaboratively train machine learning (ML) models without sharing their private data. Much of the existing work in FL focuses on efficiently learning a model for a single task. In this paper, we study simultaneous training of multiple FL mo…
In this paper, we consider a distributed optimization problem. A network of n agents, each with its own local loss function, aims to collaboratively minimize the global average loss. We prove improved convergence results for two recently proposed random reshuffling (RR) based algorithms, D-RR and GT…
We study the problem of communication-efficient distributed vector mean estimation, which is a commonly used subroutine in distributed optimization and Federated Learning (FL). Rand-$k$ sparsification is a commonly used technique to reduce communication cost, where each client sends $k < d$ of its c…
In response to recent data regulation requirements, machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical process to remove the influence of specific examples from a given model. Although exact unlearning can be achieved through complete model retraining using the remaining dataset, the associated compu…
Federated Averaging (FedAvg) and its variants are the most popular optimization algorithms in federated learning (FL). Previous convergence analyses of FedAvg either assume full client participation or partial client participation where the clients can be uniformly sampled. However, in practical cro…
Invariant risk minimization (IRM) has received increasing attention as a way to acquire environment-agnostic data representations and predictions, and also a principled solution for preventing spurious correlations from being learned and improving models’ out-of-distribution generalization. Yet, rec…
In this paper, we consider nonconvex minimax optimization, which is gaining prominence in many modern machine learning applications, such as GANs. Large-scale edge-based collection of training data in these applications calls for communication-efficient distributed optimization algorithms, such as t…
Since reinforcement learning algorithms are notoriously data-intensive, the task of sampling observations from the environment is usually split across multiple agents. However, transferring these observations from the agents to a central location can be prohibitively expensive in terms of the commun…
Data-heterogeneous federated learning (FL) systems suffer from two significant sources of convergence error: 1) client drift error caused by performing multiple local optimization steps at clients, and 2) partial client participation error caused by the fact that only a small subset of the edge clie…
Federated Learning (FL) refers to the paradigm where multiple worker nodes (WNs) build a joint model by using local data. Despite extensive research, for a generic non-convex FL problem, it is not clear, how to choose the WNs' and the server's update directions, the minibatch sizes, and the local up…
We consider the distributed stochastic optimization problem of minimizing a nonconvex function f in an adversarial setting. All the w worker nodes in the network are expected to send their stochastic gradient vectors to the fusion center (or server). However, some (at most α-fraction) of the nodes m…