ARFL: Adaptive and Robust Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning technique that enables multiple local clients holding individual datasets to collaboratively train a model, without exchanging the clients’ datasets. Conventional FL approaches often assign a fixed workload (local epoch) and step size (learning rate) to the clients during the client-side local model training and utilize all collaborating trained models’ parameters evenly during the server-side global model aggregation. Consequently, they frequently experience problems with data heterogeneity and high communication costs. In this paper, we propose a novel FL approach to mitigate the above problems. On the client side, we propose an adaptive model update approach that optimally allocates a needful number of local epochs and dynamically adjusts the learning rate to train the local model and regularizes the conventional objective function by adding a proximal term to it. On the server side, we propose a robust model aggregation strategy that potentially supplants the local outlier updates (models’ weights) prior to the aggregation. We provide the theoretical convergence results and perform extensive experiments on different data setups over the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Shakespeare datasets, which manifest that our FL scheme surpasses the baselines in terms of communication speedup, test-set performance, and global convergence.