Collaborative Machine Learning at the Wireless Edge with Blind Transmitters

We study wireless collaborative machine learning (ML), where mobile edge devices, each with its own dataset, carry out distributed stochastic gradient descent (DSGD) over-the-air with the help of a wireless access point acting as the parameter server (PS). At each iteration of the DSGD algorithm wireless devices compute gradient estimates with their local datasets, and send them to the PS over a wireless fading multiple access channel (MAC). Motivated by the additive nature of the wireless MAC, we propose an analog DSGD scheme, in which the devices transmit scaled versions of their gradient estimates in an uncoded fashion. We assume that the channel state information (CSI) is available only at the PS. We instead allow the PS to employ multiple antennas to alleviate the destructive fading effect, which cannot be cancelled by the transmitters due to the lack of CSI. Theoretical analysis indicates that, with the proposed DSGD scheme, increasing the number of PS antennas mitigates the fading effect, and, in the limit, the effects of fading and noise disappear, and the PS receives aligned signals used to update the model parameter. The theoretical results are then corroborated with the experimental ones.