Abstract
Distributed Mean Estimation (DME), in which clients communicate vectors to a parameter server that estimates their average, is a fundamental building block in communication-efficient federated learning. In this paper, we improve on previous DME techniques that achieve the optimal Normalized Mean Squared Error (NMSE) guarantee by asymptotically improving the complexity for either encoding or decoding (or both). To achieve this, we formalize the problem in a novel way that allows us to use off-the-shelf mathematical solvers to design the quantization.