# Towards Heterogeneous Clients with Elastic Federated Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09433 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09433/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05492/) (2016)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02189/) (2019)
- [Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08690/) (2017)
- [Federated Learning with Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00582/) (2018)
- [Local SGD Converges Fast and Communicates Little](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09767/) (2018)
- [signSGD: Compressed Optimisation for Non-Convex Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04434/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13461/) (2020)
- [FedPAQ: A Communication-Efficient Federated Learning Method with Periodic Averaging and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13014/) (2019)
- [Personalized Cross-Silo Federated Learning on Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03797/) (2020)
- [Tighter Theory for Local SGD on Identical and Heterogeneous Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04746/) (2019)
- [Sparse Communication for Distributed Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05021/) (2017)
- [Don't Use Large Mini-Batches, Use Local SGD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07217/) (2018)
- [Qsparse-local-SGD: Distributed SGD with Quantization, Sparsification, and Local Computations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02367/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning with Compression: Unified Analysis and Sharp Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01154/) (2020)
- [cpSGD: Communication-efficient and differentially-private distributed SGD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10559/) (2018)
- [Mime: Mimicking Centralized Stochastic Algorithms in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03606/) (2020)
- [On the Convergence of Local Descent Methods in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14425/) (2019)
- [Cooperative SGD: A unified Framework for the Design and Analysis of Communication-Efficient SGD Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07576/) (2018)
- [On the convergence properties of a K-step averaging stochastic gradient descent algorithm for nonconvex optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01012/) (2017)
- [Acceleration for Compressed Gradient Descent in Distributed and Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11364/) (2020)
- [Variance Reduced Local SGD with Lower Communication Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12844/) (2019)
- [Lifelong Learning of Spatiotemporal Representations with Dual-Memory Recurrent Self-Organization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10966/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [End-to-end Adaptive Distributed Training on PaddlePaddle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02752/) (2021)
- [Distributed Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17466/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning involves training machine learning models over devices or data silos, such as edge processors or data warehouses, while keeping the data local. Training in heterogeneous and potentially massive networks introduces bias into the system, which is originated from the non-IID data and the low participation rate in reality. In this paper, we propose Elastic Federated Learning (EFL), an unbiased algorithm to tackle the heterogeneity in the system, which makes the most informative parameters less volatile during training, and utilizes the incomplete local updates. It is an efficient and effective algorithm that compresses both upstream and downstream communications. Theoretically, the algorithm has convergence guarantee when training on the non-IID data at the low participation rate. Empirical experiments corroborate the competitive performance of EFL framework on the robustness and the efficiency.