{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/synthetic-data-shuffling-accelerates-the","title":"Synthetic data shuffling accelerates the convergence of federated learning under data heterogeneity","arxiv_id":"2306.13263","date":"2023-06-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Bo Li","Yasin Esfandiari","Mikkel N. Schmidt","Tommy S. Alstrøm","Sebastian U. Stich"],"abstract":"In federated learning, data heterogeneity is a critical challenge. A straightforward solution is to shuffle the clients' data to homogenize the distribution. However, this may violate data access rights, and how and when shuffling can accelerate the convergence of a federated optimization algorithm is not theoretically well understood. In this paper, we establish a precise and quantifiable correspondence between data heterogeneity and parameters in the convergence rate when a fraction of data is shuffled across clients. We prove that shuffling can quadratically reduce the gradient dissimilarity with respect to the shuffling percentage, accelerating convergence. Inspired by the theory, we propose a practical approach that addresses the data access rights issue by shuffling locally generated synthetic data. The experimental results show that shuffling synthetic data improves the performance of multiple existing federated learning algorithms by a large margin.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13263v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.13263v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"synthetic-data-shuffling-accelerates-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/lyn1874/fedssyn","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"federated-learning","task_name":"Federated Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2306.13263","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}