Federated Learning for Semantic Parsing: Task Formulation, Evaluation Setup, New Algorithms

Tianshu Zhang, Changchang Liu, Wei-Han Lee, Yu Su, Huan Sun


Abstract
This paper studies a new task of federated learning (FL) for semantic parsing, where multiple clients collaboratively train one global model without sharing their semantic parsing data. By leveraging data from multiple clients, the FL paradigm can be especially beneficial for clients that have little training data to develop a data-hungry neural semantic parser on their own. We propose an evaluation setup to study this task, where we re-purpose widely-used single-domain text-to-SQL datasets as clients to form a realistic heterogeneous FL setting and collaboratively train a global model. As standard FL algorithms suffer from the high client heterogeneity in our realistic setup, we further propose a novel LOss Reduction Adjusted Re-weighting (Lorar) mechanism, which adjusts each client’s contribution to the global model update based on its training loss reduction during each round. Our intuition is that the larger the loss reduction, the further away the current global model is from the client’s local optimum, and the larger weight the client should get. By applying Lorar to three widely adopted FL algorithms (FedAvg, FedOPT and FedProx), we observe that their performance can be improved substantially on average (4%-20% absolute gain under MacroAvg) and that clients with smaller datasets enjoy larger performance gains. In addition, the global model converges faster for almost all the clients.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.678
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12149–12163
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.678
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.678
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianshu Zhang, Changchang Liu, Wei-Han Lee, Yu Su, and Huan Sun. 2023. Federated Learning for Semantic Parsing: Task Formulation, Evaluation Setup, New Algorithms. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12149–12163, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Federated Learning for Semantic Parsing: Task Formulation, Evaluation Setup, New Algorithms (Zhang et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.678.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.678.mp4