Federated Learning with Projected Trajectory Regularization

Federated learning enables joint training of machine learning models from distributed clients without sharing their local data. One key challenge in federated learning is to handle non-identically distributed data across the clients, which leads to deteriorated model training performances. Prior works in this line of research mainly focus on utilizing last-step global model parameters/gradients or the linear combinations of the past model parameters/gradients, which do not fully exploit the potential of global information from the model training trajectory. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning framework with projected trajectory regularization (FedPTR) for tackling the data heterogeneity issue, which proposes a unique way to better extract the essential global information from the model training trajectory. Specifically, FedPTR allows local clients or the server to optimize an auxiliary (synthetic) dataset that mimics the learning dynamics of the recent model update and utilizes it to project the next-step model trajectory for local training regularization. We conduct rigorous theoretical analysis for our proposed framework under nonconvex stochastic settings to verify its fast convergence under heterogeneous data distributions. Experiments on various benchmark datasets and non-i.i.d. settings validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.