Federated learning (FL) offers many benefits, such as better privacy preservation and less communication overhead for scenarios with frequent data generation. In FL, local models are trained on end-devices and then migrated to the network edge or cloud for global aggregation. This aggregated model is shared back with end-devices to further improve their local models. This iterative process continues until convergence is achieved. Although FL has many merits, it has many challenges. The prominent one is computing resource constraints. End-devices typically have fewer computing resources and are unable to learn well the local models. Therefore, split FL (SFL) was introduced to address this problem. However, enabling SFL is also challenging due to wireless resource constraints and uncertainties. We formulate a joint end-devices computing resources optimization, task-offloading, and resource allocation problem for SFL at the network edge. Our problem formulation has a mixed-integer non-linear programming problem nature and hard to solve due to the presence of both binary and continuous variables. We propose a double deep Q-network (DDDQN) and optimization-based solution. Finally, we validate the proposed method using extensive simulation results.
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Federated Learning over Wireless Networks: A Band-limited Coordinated Descent Approach
We consider a many-to-one wireless architecture for federated learning at the network edge, where multiple edge devices collaboratively train a model using local data. The unreliable nature of wireless connectivity, together with constraints in computing resources at edge devices, dictates that the local updates at edge devices should be carefully crafted and compressed to match the wireless communication resources available and should work in concert with the receiver. Thus motivated, we propose SGD-based bandlimited coordinate descent algorithms for such settings. Specifically, for the wireless edge employing over-the-air computing, a common subset of k-coordinates of the gradient updates across edge devices are selected by the receiver in each iteration, and then transmitted simultaneously over k sub-carriers, each experiencing time-varying channel conditions. We characterize the impact of communication error and compression, in terms of the resulting gradient bias and mean squared error, on the convergence of the proposed algorithms. We then study learning-driven communication error minimization via joint optimization of power allocation and learning rates. Our findings reveal that optimal power allocation across different sub-carriers should take into account both the gradient values and channel conditions, thus generalizing the widely used water-filling policy. We also develop sub-optimal distributed solutions amenable to implementation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2003111
- PAR ID:
- 10299414
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 10
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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