# SoteriaFL: A Unified Framework for Private Federated Learning with Communication Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.09888 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09888/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (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)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05492/) (2016)
- [Deep Leakage from Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08935/) (2019)
- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [Stochastic First- and Zeroth-order Methods for Nonconvex Stochastic Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.5549/) (2013)
- [Federated Learning for Mobile Keyboard Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03604/) (2018)
- [Federated Optimization: Distributed Machine Learning for On-Device Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02527/) (2016)
- [Federated Learning Based on Dynamic Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04263/) (2021)
- [Differentially Private Federated Learning: A Client Level Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07557/) (2017)
- [SAGA: A Fast Incremental Gradient Method With Support for Non-Strongly Convex Composite Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.0202/) (2014)
- [FedPAQ: A Communication-Efficient Federated Learning Method with Periodic Averaging and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13014/) (2019)
- [Concentrated Differential Privacy: Simplifications, Extensions, and Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.02065/) (2016)
- [A Field Guide to Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06917/) (2021)
- [Error Feedback Fixes SignSGD and other Gradient Compression Schemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09847/) (2019)
- [Tighter Theory for Local SGD on Identical and Heterogeneous Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04746/) (2019)
- [cpSGD: Communication-efficient and differentially-private distributed SGD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10559/) (2018)
- [Private Stochastic Convex Optimization: Optimal Rates in Linear Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04763/) (2020)
- [Distributed Mean Estimation with Limited Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00429/) (2016)
- [ATOMO: Communication-efficient Learning via Atomic Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04090/) (2018)
- [ProxSkip: Yes! Local Gradient Steps Provably Lead to Communication Acceleration! Finally!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09357/) (2022)
- [EF21: A New, Simpler, Theoretically Better, and Practically Faster Error Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05203/) (2021)
- [Differentially Private Empirical Risk Minimization Revisited: Faster and More General](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05251/) (2018)
- [The Distributed Discrete Gaussian Mechanism for Federated Learning with Secure Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06387/) (2021)
- [Linear Convergence in Federated Learning: Tackling Client Heterogeneity and Sparse Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07053/) (2021)
- [PAGE: A Simple and Optimal Probabilistic Gradient Estimator for Nonconvex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10898/) (2020)
- [Distributed Differential Privacy via Shuffling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01394/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Advances and Open Challenges in Federated Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15381/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Efficient Federated Learning Methods for Foundation Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04472/) (2024)
- [Privacy and Fairness in Federated Learning: on the Perspective of Trade-off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14123/) (2023)
- [Bayesian Federated Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13267/) (2023)
- [A Survey for Federated Learning Evaluations: Goals and Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11841/) (2023)
- [OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Federated Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16288/) (2024)
- [Coresets for Vertical Federated Learning: Regularized Linear Regression and K-Means Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14664/) (2022)
- [Differentially Private SGD Without Clipping Bias: An Error-Feedback Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14632/) (2023)
- [FedP3: Federated Personalized and Privacy-friendly Network Pruning under Model Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09816/) (2024)
- [DIFF2: Differential Private Optimization via Gradient Differences for Nonconvex Distributed Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03884/) (2023)
- [Convergence and Privacy of Decentralized Nonconvex Optimization with Gradient Clipping and Communication Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09896/) (2023)
- [A Communication-Efficient Adaptive Algorithm for Federated Learning under Cumulative Regret](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08869/) (2023)
- [Simple and Optimal Stochastic Gradient Methods for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10025/) (2022)
- [Escaping Saddle Points in Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Distributed SGD with Communication Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19059/) (2023)
- [PrivSGP-VR: Differentially Private Variance-Reduced Stochastic Gradient Push with Tight Utility Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02638/) (2024)
- [Communication-efficient Vertical Federated Learning via Compressed Error Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14420/) (2024)
- [Communication-Efficient Federated Group Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06369/) (2024)
- [Problem-dependent convergence bounds for randomized linear gradient compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12898/) (2024)
- [Smoothed Normalization for Efficient Distributed Private Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13482/) (2025)
- [From Risk to Resilience: Towards Assessing and Mitigating the Risk of Data Reconstruction Attacks in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15460/) (2025)
- [Sparse Training for Federated Learning with Regularized Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13795/) (2023)
- [FedSparQ: Adaptive Sparse Quantization with Error Feedback for Robust & Efficient Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05591/) (2025)
- [Distributed Learning Meets 6G: A Communication and Computing Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12802/) (2023)
- [Federated Cubic Regularized Newton Learning with Sparsification-amplified Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04315/) (2024)
- [Characterizing the Accuracy-Communication-Privacy Trade-off in Distributed Stochastic Convex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03222/) (2025)
- [DP-CSGP: Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Push with Compressed Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13583/) (2025)
- [First Provable Guarantees for Practical Private FL: Beyond Restrictive Assumptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21521/) (2025)
- [ERIS: Enhancing the Privacy-Utility-Scalability Trade-Off in Federated Learning via Federated Shard Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08617/) (2026)
- [FedCross: Intertemporal Federated Learning Under Evolutionary Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16968/) (2024)
- [Dyn-D2P: Dynamic Differentially Private Decentralized Learning with Provable Utility Guarantee](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06651/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To enable large-scale machine learning in bandwidth-hungry environments such as wireless networks, significant progress has been made recently in designing communication-efficient federated learning algorithms with the aid of communication compression. On the other end, privacy-preserving, especially at the client level, is another important desideratum that has not been addressed simultaneously in the presence of advanced communication compression techniques yet. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that enhances the communication efficiency of private federated learning with communication compression. Exploiting both general compression operators and local differential privacy, we first examine a simple algorithm that applies compression directly to differentially-private stochastic gradient descent, and identify its limitations. We then propose a unified framework SoteriaFL for private federated learning, which accommodates a general family of local gradient estimators including popular stochastic variance-reduced gradient methods and the state-of-the-art shifted compression scheme. We provide a comprehensive characterization of its performance trade-offs in terms of privacy, utility, and communication complexity, where SoteraFL is shown to achieve better communication complexity without sacrificing privacy nor utility than other private federated learning algorithms without communication compression.