Synchronize Only the Immature Parameters: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning By Freezing Parameters Adaptively
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Federated learning allows edge devices to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their local private data. Yet, with limited network bandwidth at the edge, communication often becomes a severe bottleneck. In this paper, we find that it is unnecessary to always synchronize the full model in the entire training process, because many parameters already become mature (i.e., stable) prior to model convergence, and can thus be excluded from later synchronizations. This allows us to reduce the communication overhead without compromising the model accuracy. However, challenges are that the local parameters excluded from global synchronization may diverge on different clients, and meanwhile some parameters may stabilize only temporally. To address these challenges, we propose a novel scheme called Adaptive Parameter Freezing (APF), which fixes (freezes) the non-synchronized stable parameters in intermittent periods. Specifically, the freezing periods are tentatively adjusted in an additively-increase and multiplicatively-decrease manner—depending on whether the previously-frozen parameters remain stable in subsequent iterations. We also extend APF into APF# and APF++, which freeze parameters in a more aggressive manner to achieve larger performance benefit for large complex models. We implemented APF and its variants as Python modules with PyTorch, and extensive experiments show that APF can reduce data transfer amount by over 60%.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".