利用海森矩阵信息加速联邦零阶优化,通信量不变却快1-5倍。
Converge Faster, Talk Less: Hessian-Informed Federated Zeroth-Order Optimization
- 通过近似全局对角海森矩阵,提升零阶优化收敛速度。
- 在多个LLM微调任务中,通信轮次减少1~5倍,最快达5倍。
- 适合大规模模型微调场景,尤其关注通信效率的研究者。
零阶(ZO)优化在联邦学习中实现无维度通信,对大语言模型微调极具吸引力,因能显著降低通信开销。然而现有方法普遍忽略曲率信息,尽管其对加速收敛有明确优势。为此,我们提出HiSo:一种基于海森矩阵信息的零阶联邦优化方法,通过利用全局对角海森近似加速收敛,同时严格保持仅传输标量的通信模式,不传输任何二阶信息。理论上,在非凸函数下,若满足海森近似假设,HiSo可实现与利普希茨常数 $L$ 及模型维度 $d$ 无关的加速收敛率,为零阶优化实际收敛远快于理论 $/mathscr{O}(d)$ 上界的现象提供了合理解释。实验上,在多种大语言模型微调基准测试中,相比现有最先进基线,HiSo 在通信轮次上实现1~5倍加速。这一优越性能不仅降低了通信成本,也有力验证了海森信息在联邦零阶优化中作为有效加速器的作用。代码已开源:https://github.com/ZidongLiu/DeComFL。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables dimension-free communication in federated learning (FL), making it attractive for fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) due to significant communication savings. However, existing ZO-FL methods largely overlook curvature information, despite its well-established benefits for convergence acceleration. To address this, we propose HiSo, a Hessian-informed ZO federated optimization method that accelerates convergence by leveraging global diagonal Hessian approximations, while strictly preserving scalar-only communication without transmitting any second-order information. Theoretically, for non-convex functions, we show that HiSo can achieve an accelerated convergence rate that is independent of the Lipschitz constant $L$ and model dimension $d$ under some Hessian approximation assumptions, offering a plausible explanation for the observed phenomenon of ZO convergence being much faster than its worst-case $\mathscr{O}(d)$-bound. Empirically, across diverse LLM fine-tuning benchmarks, HiSo delivers a 1$\sim$5$\times$ speedup in communication rounds over existing state-of-the-art ZO-FL baselines. This superior convergence not only cuts communication costs but also provides strong empirical evidence that Hessian information acts as an effective accelerator in federated ZO optimization settings. Our source code is provided at https://github.com/ZidongLiu/DeComFL.
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