Federated learning (FL) enables edge devices to collaboratively train a global model without sharing raw data. In the edge environment, resource constraints hinder efficient training and aggregation of FL. Although prior studies have established model pruning as a practical strategy to reduce resource demand, the parameter symmetry problem (i.e., permutation-equivalent parameter orderings in neural networks) remains underexplored. Without addressing this symmetry, pruning on heterogeneous clients results in aggregation mismatches and degraded accuracy. In this paper, we propose Attention-guided One-shot Pruning for Federated Learning (FedAOP) to address these challenges. First, we design an attention module that integrates spatial and channel attention to highlight critical spatial responses and evaluate channel importance. Then, leveraging these importance scores, we propose an attentive pruning algorithm to generate client-specific models, thereby reducing resource consumption. Furthermore, we introduce an aggregation algorithm with attention matching, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of parameter symmetry under heterogeneous pruning. We implementFedAOPon a benchmark FL platform. The experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate thatFedAOPconsistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 11.3% in accuracy while reducing the average model footprint by 32%.

Personalized federated learning (PFL) has recently gained significant attention for its capability to address the poor convergence performance on highly heterogeneous data and the lack of personalized solutions of traditional federated learning (FL). Existing mainstream approaches either perform personalized aggregation based on a specific model architecture to leverage global knowledge or achieve personalization by exploiting client similarities. However, the former overlooks the discrepancies in client data distributions by indiscriminately aggregating all clients, while the latter lacks fine-grained collaboration of classifiers relevant to local tasks. In view of this challenge, we propose a Personalized Federated learning method for Enhancing Collaboration among Similar Classifiers (PFedCS), which aims at improving the client’s accuracy on local tasks. Concretely, it is achieved by leveraging awareness of the client classifier similarities to address the above problems. By iteratively measuring the distance of the classifier parameters between clients and clustering with each client as a cluster center, the central server adaptively identifies the collaborating clients with similar data distributions. In addition, a distance-constrained aggregation method is designed to generate customized collaborative classifiers to guide local training. As a result, extensive experimental evaluations conducted on three datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared model without exposing their raw data. However, existing FL research has primarily focused on optimizing learning performance based on the assumption of uniform client participation, with few studies delving into performance fairness under inconsistent client participation, particularly in model-heterogeneous FL environments. In view of this challenge, we propose PHP-FL, a novel model-heterogeneous FL method that explicitly addresses scenarios with varying client participation probabilities to enhance both model accuracy and performance fairness. Specifically, we introduce a Dual-End Aligned ensemble Learning (DEAL) module, where small auxiliary models on clients are used for dual-end knowledge alignment and local ensemble learning, effectively tackling model heterogeneity without a public dataset. Furthermore, to mitigate update conflicts caused by inconsistent participation probabilities, we propose an Importance-driven Selective Parameter Update (ISPU) module, which accurately updates critical local parameters based on training progress. Finally, we implement PHP-FL on a lightweight FL platform with heterogeneous clients across three different client participation patterns. Extensive experiments under heterogeneous settings and diverse client participation patterns demonstrate that PHP-FL achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and fairness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Siyuan01/PHP-FL-main.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution in Edge Computing (EC) environments to process the proliferation of data generated by edge devices. By collaboratively optimizing the global machine learning models on distributed edge devices, FL circumvents the need for transmitting raw data and enhances user privacy. Despite practical successes, FL still confronts significant challenges including constrained edge device resources, multiple tasks deployment, and data heterogeneity. However, existing studies focus on mitigating the FL training costs of each single task whereas neglecting the resource consumption across multiple tasks in heterogeneous FL scenarios. In this paper, we propose Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Local Parameter Sharing (FedLPS) to fill this gap. FedLPS leverages principles from transfer learning to facilitate the deployment of multiple tasks on a single device by dividing the local model into a shareable encoder and task-specific encoders. To further reduce resource consumption, a channel-wise model pruning algorithm that shrinks the footprint of local models while accounting for both data and system heterogeneity is employed in FedLPS. Additionally, a novel heterogeneous model aggregation algorithm is proposed to aggregate the heterogeneous predictors in FedLPS. We implemented the proposed FedLPS on a real FL platform and compared it with state-of-the-art (SOTA) FL frameworks. The experimental results on five popular datasets and two modern DNN models illustrate that the proposed FedLPS significantly outperforms the SOTA FL frameworks by up to 4.88% and reduces the computational resource consumption by 21.3%. Our code is available at: https://github.com/jyzgh/FedLPS.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent machine learning paradigm in edge computing environments, enabling edge devices to collaboratively optimize a global model without sharing their private data. However, existing FL frameworks suffer from efficacy deterioration due to the system heterogeneity inherent in edge computing, especially in the presence of domain shifts across local data. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous FL framework DapperFL, to enhance model performance across multiple domains. In DapperFL, we introduce a dedicated Model Fusion Pruning (MFP) module to produce personalized compact local models for clients to address the system heterogeneity challenges. The MFP module prunes local models with fused knowledge obtained from both local and remaining domains, ensuring robustness to domain shifts. Additionally, we design a Domain Adaptive Regularization (DAR) module to further improve the overall performance of DapperFL. The DAR module employs regularization generated by the pruned model, aiming to learn robust representations across domains. Furthermore, we introduce a specific aggregation algorithm for aggregating heterogeneous local models with tailored architectures and weights. We implement DapperFL on a real-world FL platform with heterogeneous clients. Experimental results on benchmark datasets with multiple domains demonstrate that DapperFL outperforms several state-of-the-art FL frameworks by up to 2.28%, while significantly achieving model volume reductions ranging from 20% to 80%. Our code is available at: https://github.com/jyzgh/DapperFL.

With the emergence of various convolutional neural network (CNN)-based applications and the rapid growth of CNN model scale, the resource-constricted end devices can hardly deploy CNN-based applications. Current work optimizes the CNN model on edge servers and deploys the optimized model on devices in an edge computing environment. However, most of them only optimize the resource consumption within or across models solely, whereas neglecting the other side. In this article, we propose a novel CNN-based resource optimization approach (CroApp) that not only optimizes the resource consumption within the CNN model but also pays attention to resource optimization across the applications. Specifically, we adopt model compression as the “inner-model” optimization method, as well as computation sharing as the “intermodel” optimization method. First, during “inner-model” optimization, the CroApp prunes unnecessary parameters within the model on edge servers to reduce the scale of the model. Then, during “intermodel” optimization, the CroApp trains a set of shareable models based on the pruned model and sends these shareable models to end devices. Finally, the CroApp adaptively adjusts the shared models to reduce resource consumption. The experimental results show that the CroApp outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of resource reduction, scalability, and application performance.