SPADE-DFL: Communication-Efficient Decentralized Federated Learning via Derivative-Free Linearized ADMM

Reducing communication in derivative-free decentralized learning requires controlling the disagreement accumulated over multiple local updates. This paper develops SPADE-DFL, a primal–dual method that allows the number of local function-value updates between neighbor exchanges to grow with the computation budget while preserving the nonprivate convergence order. For smooth nonconvex objectives under uniform query-moment bounds, the prescribed nonprivate schedule achieves a time-averaged stationarity and consensus bound of $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/3})$ using only $\Theta (T^{2/3})$ communication rounds, where $T$ is the number of local updates per client. For private training, the accumulated data-dependent increment is isolated from the graph correction, allowing one protected state per client and round to generate all outgoing messages. We prove client-level differential privacy for the full interactive transcript and quantify the resulting optimization error over a finite horizon. Experiments on four classification tasks show that SPADE-DFL achieves higher mean test accuracy than existing decentralized learning methods. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SPADE-DFL-1E2D.