GLASU: A Communication-Efficient Algorithm for Federated Learning with Vertically Distributed Graph Data

Xinwei Zhang, Mingyi Hong, Jie Chen

Keywords: Federated Learning, Graph Neural Network, Feature Distributed Federated Learning

TL;DR: This paper proposed a GNN model design approach and a communication efficient algorithm for federated learning on feature distributed graph data

Abstract: Vertical federated learning (VFL) is a distributed learning paradigm, where computing clients collectively train a model based on the partial features of the same set of samples they possess. Current research on VFL focuses on the case when samples are independent, but it rarely addresses an emerging scenario when samples are interrelated through a graph. For graph-structured data, graph neural networks (GNNs) are rather competitive machine learning models, but a naive implementation in the VFL setting causes a significant communication overhead; moreover, the analysis is faced with a challenge caused by the biased stochastic gradients. In this paper, we propose a model splitting method that splits a backbone GNN across the clients and the server and a communication-efficient algorithm, GLASU, to train such a model. GLASU adopts lazy aggregation and stale updates to skip aggregation when evaluating the model and skip feature exchanges during training, greatly reducing communication. We offer a theoretical analysis and conduct extensive numerical experiments on real-world datasets, showing that the proposed algorithm effectively trains a GNN model, whose performance matches that of the backbone GNN when trained in a centralized manner.

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