arXiv:2409.15955cs.LGcs.AI2024-09

用历史轨迹指导梯度估计,提升零阶联邦学习收敛速度。

A Historical Trajectory Assisted Optimization Method for Zeroth-Order Federated Learning

  • 基于历史解轨迹构建非均匀采样方向,改进梯度估计。
  • 在多个数据集上实现更快收敛,通信与计算开销几乎不变。
  • 适合梯度不可得的联邦学习场景,尤其适用于资源受限设备。

联邦学习依赖分布式梯度下降,但在梯度不可用时需通过零阶信息估计。传统方法沿各向同性随机方向计算有限差分,易因忽略目标函数几何特性而产生高估误差。本文提出一种非各向同性采样方法,梯度在由历史解轨迹张成的子空间中估计,以增强对有利区域的探索,从而提升收敛性。该方法采用协方差矩阵进行采样,其为两部分的凸组合:一是包含子空间基的细长投影矩阵,用于强化利用能力;二是历史轨迹本身。我们在零阶联邦设置中实现该方法,结果表明收敛速率与已有方法相当,且通信和本地计算开销无显著增加。多个数值实验验证了该方法相较于常见零阶联邦优化算法的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Federated learning heavily relies on distributed gradient descent techniques. In the situation where gradient information is not available, the gradients need to be estimated from zeroth-order information, which typically involves computing finite-differences along isotropic random directions. This method suffers from high estimation errors, as the geometric features of the objective landscape may be overlooked during the isotropic sampling. In this work, we propose a non-isotropic sampling method to improve the gradient estimation procedure. Gradients in our method are estimated in a subspace spanned by historical trajectories of solutions, aiming to encourage the exploration of promising regions and hence improve the convergence. The proposed method uses a covariance matrix for sampling which is a convex combination of two parts. The first part is a thin projection matrix containing the basis of the subspace which is designed to improve the exploitation ability. The second part is the historical trajectories. We implement this method in zeroth-order federated settings, and show that the convergence rate aligns with existing ones while introducing no significant overheads in communication or local computation. The effectiveness of our proposal is verified on several numerical experiments in comparison to several commonly-used zeroth-order federated optimization algorithms.

联邦学习零阶优化梯度估计高效算法

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