Reducing the Communication Cost of Federated Learning through Multistage Optimization

A central question in federated learning (FL) is how to design optimization algorithms that minimize the communication cost of training a model over heterogeneous data distributed across many clients. A popular technique for reducing communication is the use of local steps, where clients take multiple optimization steps over local data before communicating with the server (e.g., FedAvg, SCAFFOLD). This contrasts with centralized methods, where clients take one optimization step per communication round (e.g., Minibatch SGD). A recent lower bound on the communication complexity of first-order methods shows that centralized methods are optimal over highly-heterogeneous data, whereas local methods are optimal over purely homogeneous data [Woodworth et al., 2020]. For intermediate heterogeneity levels, no algorithm is known to match the lower bound. In this paper, we propose a multistage optimization scheme that nearly matches the lower bound across all heterogeneity levels. The idea is to first run a local method up to a heterogeneity-induced error floor; next, we switch to a centralized method for the remaining steps. Our analysis may help explain empirically-successful stepsize decay methods in FL [Charles et al., 2020; Reddi et al., 2020]. We demonstrate the scheme's practical utility in image classification tasks.