An inferential perspective on federated learning

TL;DR: motivated to better understand the fundamental tradeoffs in federated learning, we present a probabilistic perspective that generalizes and improves upon federated optimization and enables a new class of efficient federated learning algorithms. Thanks to deep learning, today we can train better machine learning models when given access to massive data. However, the standard, centralized training is impossible in many interesting use-cases--due to the associated data transfer and maintenance costs (most notably in video analytics), privacy concerns (e.g., in healthcare settings), or sensitivity of the proprietary data (e.g., in drug discovery). And yet, different parties that own even a small amount of data want to benefit from access to accurate models. This is where federated learning comes to the rescue!