Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency

Federated Learning is a machine learning setting where the goal is to train a high-quality centralized model with training data distributed over a large number of clients each with unreliable and relatively slow network connections. We consider learning algorithms for this setting where on each round, each client independently computes an update to the current model based on its local data, and communicates this update to a central server, where the client-side updates are aggregated to compute a new global model. The typical clients in this setting are mobile phones, and communication efficiency is of utmost importance. In this paper, we propose two ways to reduce the uplink communication costs. The proposed methods are evaluated on the application of training a deep neural network to perform image classification. Our best approach reduces the upload communication required to train a reasonable model by two orders of magnitude.

• Machine Intelligence