Federated Learning with SVMs: Dynamic SGD for Efficient Hyperparameter Optimization
In the current digital landscape, organizations are actively looking for user data to make informed decisions at the edge. This raises a need for a solution that prioritizes user privacy while leveraging user's data. Federated learning (FL) emerges as a viable solution to address this issue. However, these methods are dominated by complex, resource-intensive neural networks (NN). This necessitates the development of an FL technique that protects user privacy while employing lightweight models. Support vector machines (SVMs) provide a lightweight alternative, but their traditional training techniques, such as quadratic programming and sequential minimal optimization, are inefficient and incompatible with FL. Existing stochastic gradient descent (SGD)-based SVM variants also depend on fixed or heuristic learning rates, which restrict convergence under non-IID data and client heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learned dynamic learning rate controller for SGD-trained SVMs in federated settings. Unlike standard adaptive optimizers, the controller adapts learning rates over each epoch and clients. This process enables faster convergence and lower communication overhead to heterogeneous data. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets show that federated SVM framework provides effective results comparable to NN-based FL approaches while significantly less computational and communication overhead. Received: 29 September 2025 | Revised: 30 March 2026 | Accepted: 9 July 2026Conflicts of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Kaggle at https://git-disl.github.io/GTDLBench/datasets/mnist_datasets/ (MNIST), the NIST repository at https://www.nist.gov/itl/products-and-services/emnist-dataset (FEMNIST), and the University of Toronto's repository at https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar.html (CIFAR-10). Author Contribution Statement Deebakkarthi Chinnasame Rani: Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Gowtham Ramesh: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration. Sountharrajan Sehar: Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – review & editing, Project administration. Varun Aiyaswamy Kannan: Formal analysis, Resources, Data curation. Elambharathi Padmavathi Thangavel: Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Visualization. Bharath Kumar Kanapareddy: Investigation, Resources, Data curation.