README.md

Dual Optimization Methods for Federated Learning

Simple Python implementation of Federated Dual Coordinate Descent (FedDCD) and Federated Dual Averaging (FedDualAvg). Federated Averaging (FedAvg) is used as a baseline for comparison.

Note: some utility functions (argument parsing, tensorboard functionality) have been adapted from https://github.com/yjlee22/FedShare

Directory Contents:

Modules:

• options.py argument parser that takes in algorithm and model hyperparameters
• utils.py contains functions for computing local quadratic objectives and selecting clients

Scripts and Notebooks:

• fed_avg.py generalized federated averaging algorithm
• fed_dual_avg.py federated dual averaging using soft thresholding (l1 regularization)
• fed_dcd.py federated dual coordinate descent using approximate descent directions
• figures.ipynb generates the paper figures

Install required Python packages

$  pip install requirements.txt

To create figures from the paper:

To perform each of the four experiments we run the following shell scripts:

$	participation_experiment.sh
$	noise_experiment.sh
$	sparsity_experiment.sh
$	distr_experiment.sh

Next running the figures.ipynb notebook will load the parameter and objective distances from each run (assuming they are saved to the correct directory), allowing the user to generate each figure.