Gradient sparsification for efficient wireless federated learning with differential privacy.

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing raw data with each other. However, it suffers from the leakage of private information from uploading models. In addition, as the model size grows, the training latency increases due to the limited transmission bandwidth and model performance degradation while using differential privacy (DP) protection. In this paper, we propose a gradient sparsification empowered FL framework with DP over wireless channels, to improve training efficiency without sacrificing convergence performance. Specifically, we first design a random sparsification algorithm to retain a fraction of the gradient elements in each client’s local model, thereby mitigating the performance degradation induced by DP and reducing the number of transmission parameters over wireless channels. Then, we analyze the convergence bound of the proposed algorithm, by modeling a non-convex FL problem. Next, we formulate a time-sequential stochastic optimization problem for minimizing the developed convergence bound, under the constraints of transmit power, the average transmitting delay, as well as the client’s DP requirement. Utilizing the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty framework, we develop an analytical solution to the optimization problem. Extensive experiments have been implemented on three real-life datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. We show that our proposed algorithms can fully exploit the interworking between communication and computation to outperform the baselines, i.e., random scheduling, round robin, and delay-minimization algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]