Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a distributed machine learning paradigm without end-user data transmission, effectively avoiding privacy leakage. Participating devices in FL are usually bandwidth-constrained, and the uplink is much slower than the downlink in wireless networks, which causes a severe uplink communication bottleneck. A prominent direction to alleviate this problem is federated dropout, which drops fractional weights of local models. However, existing federated dropout studies focus on random or ordered dropout and lack theoretical support, resulting in unguaranteed performance. In this paper, we propose Federated learning with Bayesian Inference-based Adaptive Dropout (FedBIAD), which regards weight rows of local models as probability distributions and adaptively drops partial weight rows based on importance indicators correlated with the trend of local training loss. By applying FedBIAD, each client adaptively selects a high-quality dropping pattern with accurate approximations and only transmits parameters of non-dropped weight rows to mitigate uplink costs while improving accuracy. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the convergence rate of the average generalization error of FedBIAD is minimax optimal up to a squared logarithmic factor. Extensive experiments on image classification and next-word prediction show that compared with status quo approaches, FedBIAD provides 2x uplink reduction with an accuracy increase of up to 2.41% even on non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data, which brings up to 72% decrease in training time.

在这篇论文中，我们提出了一种基于贝叶斯推理的自适应辍学方法（FedBIAD），通过逐行将局部模型权重转化为概率分布，并自适应地根据与本地训练损失趋势相关的重要性指标辍掉部分权重行，从而在减少上行通信成本的同时提高准确性，理论分析证明FedBIAD的平均泛化误差的收敛速度是最小最大的，甚至在非独立同分布数据上可以提高2.41%的准确率，并最多缩短72%的训练时间。

基于贝叶斯推断的自适应dropout联邦学习：通信高效且准确性保证的FedBIAD