Staleness-aware semi-asynchronous federated learning

Abstract

As the attempts to distribute deep learning using personal data have increased, the importance of federated learning (FL) has also increased. Attempts have been made to overcome the core challenges of federated learning (i.e., statistical and system heterogeneity) using synchronous or asynchronous protocols. However, stragglers reduce training efficiency in terms of latency and accuracy in each protocols, respectively. To solve straggler issues, a semi-asynchronous protocol that combines the two protocols can be applied to FL; however, effectively handling the staleness of the local model is a difficult problem. We proposed SASAFL to solve the training inefficiency caused by staleness in semi-asynchronous FL. SASAFL enables stable training by considering the quality of the global model to synchronise the servers and clients. In addition, it achieves high accuracy and low latency by adjusting the number of participating clients in response to changes in global loss and immediately processing clients that did not to participate in the previous round. An evaluation was conducted under various conditions to verify the effectiveness of the SASAFL. SASAFL achieved 19.69% higher accuracy than the baseline, 2.32 times higher round-to-accuracy, and 2.24 times higher latency-to-accuracy. Additionally, SASAFL always achieved target accuracy that the baseline can’t reach.