When:
Friday, January 23, 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM CT
Where: Technological Institute, M416, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Cost: Free
Contact:
Anne Umbanhowar
(847) 491-3345
anne.umbanhowar@northwestern.edu
Group: McCormick-Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics (ESAM)
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Title: Federated Low-rank Learning
Speaker: Diego Klabjan, Northwestern University
Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) faces significant challenges related to communication efficiency and performance reduction when scaling to many clients. To address these issues, we explore the potential of using low-rank updates and provide the first theoretical study of rank properties in FL. Our theoretical analysis shows that a client’s loss exhibits a higher-rank structure (i.e., gradients span higher-rank subspaces of the Hessian) compared to the server’s loss, and that low-rank approximations of the clients’ gradients have greater similarity. Consequently, we propose FedLoRU, a general low-rank update framework for FL. Our framework enforces low-rank client-side updates and accumulates these updates to form a higher rank model. Experimental results demonstrate that FedLoRU performs comparably to full-rank algorithms and exhibits robustness.
Joint work with Haemin Park, PhD candidate in IEMS
Zoom: TBA
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