Divide-and-Conquer Federated Learning Under Data Heterogeneity

Federated Learning allows training of data stored in distributed devices without the need for centralizing training-data, thereby maintaining data-privacy. Addressing the ability to handle data heterogeneity (non-identical and independent distribution or non-IID) is a key enabler for the wider deployment of Federated Learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Divide-andConquer training methodology that enables the use of the popular FedAvg aggregation algorithm by over-coming the acknowledged FedAvg limitations in non-IID environments. We propose a novel use of Cosine-distance based Weight Divergence metric to determine the exact point where a Deep Learning network can be divided into class-agnostic initial layers and class-specific deep layers for performing a Divide and Conquer training. We show that the methodology achieves trained-model accuracy at-par with (and in certain cases exceeding) the numbers achieved by state-of-the-art algorithms like FedProx, FedMA, etc. Also, we show that this methodology leads to compute and/or bandwidth optimizations under certain documented conditions.