FedDIP: Federated Learning with Extreme Dynamic Pruning and Incremental
  Regularization
Qianyu Long Christos Anagnostopoulos Shameem Puthiya Parambath Daning Bi
Federated Learning (FL) has been successfully adopted for distributed
training and inference of large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However,
DNNs are characterized by an extremely large number of parameters, thus,
yielding significant challenges in exchanging these parameters among
distributed nodes and managing the memory. Although recent DNN compression
methods (e.g., sparsification, pruning) tackle such challenges, they do not
holistically consider an adaptively controlled reduction of parameter exchange
while maintaining high accuracy levels. We, therefore, contribute with a novel
FL framework (coined FedDIP), which combines (i) dynamic model pruning with
error feedback to eliminate redundant information exchange, which contributes
to significant performance improvement, with (ii) incremental regularization
that can achieve \textit{extreme} sparsity of models. We provide convergence
analysis of FedDIP and report on a comprehensive performance and comparative
assessment against state-of-the-art methods using benchmark data sets and DNN
models. Our results showcase that FedDIP not only controls the model sparsity
but efficiently achieves similar or better performance compared to other model
pruning methods adopting incremental regularization during distributed model
training. The code is available at: https://github.com/EricLoong/feddip.