Papers › A New Look and Convergence Rate of Federated Multi-Task Learning with Laplacian Regularization

A New Look and Convergence Rate of Federated Multi-Task Learning with Laplacian Regularization

14 Feb 2021arXiv:2102.07148archive 2025-07-28

Canh T. Dinh, Tung T. Vu, Nguyen H. Tran, Minh N. Dao, Hongyu Zhang

Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non- IID) data distribution among clients is considered as the key factor that degrades the performance of federated learning (FL). Several approaches to handle non-IID data such as personalized FL and federated multi-task learning (FMTL) are of great interest to research communities. In this work, first, we formulate the FMTL problem using Laplacian regularization to explicitly leverage the relationships among the models of clients for multi-task learning. Then, we introduce a new view of the FMTL problem, which in the first time shows that the formulated FMTL problem can be used for conventional FL and personalized FL. We also propose two algorithms FedU and dFedU to solve the formulated FMTL problem in communication-centralized and decentralized schemes, respectively. Theoretically, we prove that the convergence rates of both algorithms achieve linear speedup for strongly convex and sublinear speedup of order 1/2 for nonconvex objectives. Experimentally, we show that our algorithms outperform the algorithm FedAvg, FedProx, SCAFFOLD, and AFL in FL settings, MOCHA in FMTL settings, as well as pFedMe and Per-FedAvg in personalized FL settings.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

dual-grp/fedu_fmtl officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
CharlieDinh/FedU_FMTL mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Federated LearningFew-Shot LearningMulti-Task LearningPersonalized Federated Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections