Federated learning allows edge devices to collaboratively learn a shared
model while keeping the training data on device, decoupling the ability to do
model training from the need to store the data in the cloud. We propose
Federated matched averaging (FedMA) algorithm designed for federated learning
of modern neural network architectures e.g. convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) and LSTMs. FedMA constructs the shared global model in a layer-wise
manner by matching and averaging hidden elements (i.e. channels for convolution
layers; hidden states for LSTM; neurons for fully connected layers) with
similar feature extraction signatures. Our experiments indicate that FedMA not
only outperforms popular state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms on deep
CNN and LSTM architectures trained on real world datasets, but also reduces the
overall communication burden.