paper-with-me

Papers

Generalization in Federated Learning: A Conditional Mutual Information Framework

2025-03-06 · Ziqiao Wang, Cheng Long, Yongyi Mao

Federated learning (FL) is a widely adopted privacy-preserving distributed learning framework, yet its generalization performance remains less explored compared to centralized learning. In FL, the generalization error consists of two components: the out-of-sample gap, which measures the gap between the empirical and true risk for participating clients, and the participation gap, which quantifies the risk difference between participating and non-participating clients. In this work, we apply an information-theoretic analysis via the conditional mutual information (CMI) framework to study FL's two-level generalization. Beyond the traditional supersample-based CMI framework, we introduce a superclient construction to accommodate the two-level generalization setting in FL. We derive multiple CMI-based bounds, including hypothesis-based CMI bounds, illustrating how privacy constraints in FL can imply generalization guarantees. Furthermore, we propose fast-rate evaluated CMI bounds that recover the best-known convergence rate for two-level FL generalization in the small empirical risk regime. For specific FL model aggregation strategies and structured loss functions, we refine our bounds to achieve improved convergence rates with respect to the number of participating clients. Empirical evaluations confirm that our evaluated CMI bounds are non-vacuous and accurately capture the generalization behavior of FL algorithms.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2503.04091

Code (0)

등록된 구현이 없습니다.

Tasks

Federated LearningPrivacy Preserving

Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반

A Hierarchical Sampling Framework for bounding the Generalization Error of Federated Learning

2026-05-05 · Dario Filatrella, Ragnar Thobaben, Mikael Skoglund arxiv

We study expected generalization bounds for the Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) setup using Wasserstein distance. We introduce a generalized framework in which data is sampled hierarchically, and we model it with a…

Federated Learning

Sharpened Generalization Bounds based on Conditional Mutual Information and an Application to Noisy, Iterative Algorithms

2020-04-27 · NeurIPS 2020 12 · Mahdi Haghifam, Jeffrey Negrea, Ashish Khisti, Daniel M. Roy 외

The information-theoretic framework of Russo and J. Zou (2016) and Xu and Raginsky (2017) provides bounds on the generalization error of a learning algorithm in terms of the mutual information between the algorithm's out…

Generalization Bounds

Reasoning About Generalization via Conditional Mutual Information

2020-01-24 · Thomas Steinke, Lydia Zakynthinou

We provide an information-theoretic framework for studying the generalization properties of machine learning algorithms. Our framework ties together existing approaches, including uniform convergence bounds and recent me…

BIG-bench Machine Learning

Individually Conditional Individual Mutual Information Bound on Generalization Error

2020-12-17 · Ruida Zhou, Chao Tian, Tie Liu

We propose a new information-theoretic bound on generalization error based on a combination of the error decomposition technique of Bu et al. and the conditional mutual information (CMI) construction of Steinke and Zakyn…

LEMMA

Limitations of Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds for Gradient Descent Methods in Stochastic Convex Optimization

2022-12-27 · Mahdi Haghifam, Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez, Ragnar Thobaben, Mikael Skoglund 외

To date, no "information-theoretic" frameworks for reasoning about generalization error have been shown to establish minimax rates for gradient descent in the setting of stochastic convex optimization. In this work, we c…

Generalization Bounds