Optimizing Federated Learning on Non-IID Data with Reinforcement Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The widespread deployment of machine learning applications in ubiquitous environments has sparked interests in exploiting the vast amount of data stored on mobile devices. To preserve data privacy, Federated Learning has been proposed to learn a shared model by performing distributed training locally on participating devices and aggregating the local models into a global one. However, due to the limited network connectivity of mobile devices, it is not practical for federated learning to perform model updates and aggregation on all participating devices in parallel. Besides, data samples across all devices are usually not independent and identically distributed (IID), posing additional challenges to the convergence and speed of federated learning. In this paper, we propose Favor, an experience-driven control framework that intelligently chooses the client devices to participate in each round of federated learning to counterbalance the bias introduced by non-IID data and to speed up convergence. Through both empirical and mathematical analysis, we observe an implicit connection between the distribution of training data on a device and the model weights trained based on those data, which enables us to profile the data distribution on that device based on its uploaded model weights. We then propose a mechanism based on deep Q-learning that learns to select a subset of devices in each communication round to maximize a reward that encourages the increase of validation accuracy and penalizes the use of more communication rounds. With extensive experiments performed in PyTorch, we show that the number of communication rounds required in federated learning can be reduced by up to 49% on the MNIST dataset, 23% on FashionMNIST, and 42% on CIFAR-10, as compared to the Federated Averaging algorithm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".