Heterogeneity-Aware Federated Learning with Adaptive Client Selection and Gradient Compression

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) allows multiple clients cooperatively train models without disclosing local data. However, the existing works fail to address all these practical concerns in FL: limited communication resources, dynamic network conditions and heterogeneous client properties, which slow down the convergence of FL. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a heterogeneity-aware FL framework, called FedCG, with adaptive client selection and gradient compression. Specifically, the parameter server (PS) selects a representative client subset considering statistical heterogeneity and sends the global model to them. After local training, these selected clients upload compressed model updates matching their capabilities to the PS for aggregation, which significantly alleviates the communication load and mitigates the straggler effect. We theoretically analyze the impact of both client selection and gradient compression on convergence performance. Guided by the derived convergence rate, we develop an iteration-based algorithm to jointly optimize client selection and compression ratio decision using submodular maximization and linear programming. Extensive experiments on both real-world prototypes and simulations show that FedCG can provide up to 5.3× speedup compared to other methods.