Revisiting Ensembling in One-Shot Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is an appealing approach to training machine learning models without sharing raw data. However, standard FL algorithms are iterative and thus induce a significant communication cost. One-Shot FL (OFL) trades the iterative exchange of models between clients and the server with a single round of communication, thereby saving substantially on communication costs. Not surprisingly, OFL exhibits a performance gap in terms of accuracy with respect to FL, especially under high data heterogeneity. We introduce Fens, a novel federated ensembling scheme that approaches the accuracy of FL with the communication efficiency of OFL. Learning in Fens proceeds in two phases: first, clients train models locally and send them to the server, similar to OFL; second, clients collaboratively train a lightweight prediction aggregator model using FL.