# Communication-efficient Federated Learning with Single-Step Synthetic Features Compressor for Faster Convergence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13562/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [signSGD: Compressed Optimisation for Non-Convex Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04434/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02079/) (2021)
- [Deep Gradient Compression: Reducing the Communication Bandwidth for Distributed Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01887/) (2017)
- [Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning from Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02891/) (2019)
- [Sparsified SGD with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07599/) (2018)
- [Error Feedback Fixes SignSGD and other Gradient Compression Schemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09847/) (2019)
- [Sparse Communication for Distributed Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05021/) (2017)
- [Gradient Sparsification for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09854/) (2017)
- [FedKD: Communication Efficient Federated Learning via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13323/) (2021)
- [Demystifying Parallel and Distributed Deep Learning: An In-Depth Concurrency Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09941/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning via Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04489/) (2020)
- [Rethinking gradient sparsification as total error minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00951/) (2021)
- [Communication-Efficient Federated Learning with Compensated Overlap-FedAvg](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06706/) (2020)
- [FedSynth: Gradient Compression via Synthetic Data in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01273/) (2022)
- [Why Batch Normalization Damage Federated Learning on Non-IID Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02982/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A Systematic Review of Federated Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16682/) (2024)
- [E-3SFC: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning with Double-way Features Synthesizing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03092/) (2025)
- [Mask-Encoded Sparsification: Mitigating Biased Gradients in Communication-Efficient Split Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13787/) (2024)
- [Deploying Models to Non-participating Clients in Federated Learning without Fine-tuning: A Hypernetwork-based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12673/) (2025)
- [ForgeVLA: Federated Vision-Language-Action Learning without Language Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07474/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reducing communication overhead in federated learning (FL) is challenging but crucial for large-scale distributed privacy-preserving machine learning. While methods utilizing sparsification or others can largely lower the communication overhead, the convergence rate is also greatly compromised. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named single-step synthetic features compressor (3SFC), to achieve communication-efficient FL by directly constructing a tiny synthetic dataset based on raw gradients. Thus, 3SFC can achieve an extremely low compression rate when the constructed dataset contains only one data sample. Moreover, 3SFC's compressing phase utilizes a similarity-based objective function so that it can be optimized with just one step, thereby considerably improving its performance and robustness. In addition, to minimize the compressing error, error feedback (EF) is also incorporated into 3SFC. Experiments on multiple datasets and models suggest that 3SFC owns significantly better convergence rates compared to competing methods with lower compression rates (up to 0.02%). Furthermore, ablation studies and visualizations show that 3SFC can carry more information than competing methods for every communication round, further validating its effectiveness.