Agnostic federated learning

Mehryar Mohri, Gary Sivek, Ananda Theertha Suresh

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

A key learning scenario in large-scale applications is that of federated learning, where a centralized model is trained based on data originating from a large number of clients. We argue that, with the existing training and inference, federated models can be biased towards different clients. Instead, we propose a new framework of agnostic federated learning, where the centralized model is optimized for any target distribution formed by a mixture of the client distributions. We further show that this framework naturally yields a notion of fairness. We present data-dependent Rademacher complexity guarantees for learning with this objective, which guide the definition of an algorithm for agnostic federated learning. We also give a fast stochastic optimization algorithm for solving the corresponding optimization problem, for which we prove convergence bounds, assuming a convex loss function and a convex hypothesis set. We further empirically demonstrate the benefits of our approach in several datasets. Beyond federated learning, our framework and algorithm can be of interest to other learning scenarios such as cloud computing, domain adaptation, drifting, and other contexts where the training and test distributions do not coincide.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019
PublisherInternational Machine Learning Society (IMLS)
Pages8114-8124
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781510886988
StatePublished - Jan 1 2019
Event36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019 - Long Beach, United States
Duration: Jun 9 2019Jun 15 2019

Publication series

Name36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019
Volume2019-June

Conference

Conference36th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLong Beach
Period6/9/196/15/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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