Multi-Model Federated Learning with Provable Guarantees

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) is a variant of distributed learning where edge devices collaborate to learn a model without sharing their data with the central server or each other. We refer to the process of training multiple independent models simultaneously in a federated setting using a common pool of clients as multi-model FL. In this work, we propose two variants of the popular FedAvg algorithm for multi-model FL, with provable convergence guarantees. We further show that for the same amount of computation, multi-model FL can have better performance than training each model separately. We supplement our theoretical results with experiments in strongly convex, convex, and non-convex settings.