How Much Regularization Survives Averaging? Update Masking in Federated Learning
Federated learning on non-IID data seeks flat minima to generalize across clients, and existing methods borrow sharpness-aware minimization from centralized training. There is a second way to reach flat minima, in which the regularization comes for free from noise added to the parameter updates, and it has never been carried over to the federated setting as an implicit regularizer. We show the reason. Masking charges the optimizer for moving in sharp directions. We prove that when each client draws its own mask, federated averaging weakens that charge by exactly the cohort size, and that giving every client the same mask brings it back by a factor equal to the inverse gradient diversity o...
| Authors | Wenhao Yan, Fu Kuroda, Yucheng Jin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 August 2026 |
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