Convergence Visualizer of Decentralized Federated Distillation with Reduced Communication Costs

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) achieves collaborative learning without the need for data sharing, thus preventing privacy leakage. To extend FL into a fully decentralized algorithm, researchers have applied distributed optimization algorithms to FL by considering machine learning (ML) tasks as parameter optimization problems. Conversely, the consensus-based multi-hop federated distillation (CMFD) proposed in the authors' previous work makes neural network (NN) models get close with others in a function space rather than in a parameter space. Hence, this study solves two unresolved challenges of CMFD: (1) communication cost reduction and (2) visualization of model convergence. Based on a proposed dynamic communication cost reduction method (DCCR), the amount of data transferred in a network is reduced; however, with a slight degradation in the prediction accuracy. In addition, a technique for visualizing the distance between the NN models in a function space is also proposed. The technique applies a dimensionality reduction technique by approximating infinite-dimensional functions as numerical vectors to visualize the trajectory of how the models change by the distributed learning algorithm.