Multi-objective Evolutionary Federated Learning

Federated learning is an emerging technique used to prevent the leakage of private information. Unlike centralized learning that needs to collect data from users and store them collectively on a cloud server, federated learning makes it possible to learn a global model while the data are distributed on the users' devices. However, compared with the traditional centralized approach, the federated setting consumes considerable communication resources of the clients, which is indispensable for updating global models and prevents this technique from being widely used. In this paper, we aim to optimize the structure of the neural network models in federated learning using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to simultaneously minimize the communication costs and the global model test errors. A scalable method for encoding network connectivity is adapted to federated learning to enhance the efficiency in evolving deep neural networks. Experimental results on both multilayer perceptrons and convolutional neural networks indicate that the proposed optimization method is able to find optimized neural network models that can not only significantly reduce communication costs but also improve the learning performance of federated learning compared with the standard fully connected neural networks.