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1. Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization

   Wang, Jianyu; Liu, Qinghua; Liang, Hao; Joshi, Gauri; Poor, H. Vincent (December 2020, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   null (Ed.)

   In federated learning, heterogeneity in the clients' local datasets and computation speeds results in large variations in the number of local updates performed by each client in each communication round. Naive weighted aggregation of such models causes objective inconsistency, that is, the global model converges to a stationary point of a mismatched objective function which can be arbitrarily different from the true objective. This paper provides a general framework to analyze the convergence of federated heterogeneous optimization algorithms. It subsumes previously proposed methods such as FedAvg and FedProx and provides the first principled understanding of the solution bias and the convergence slowdown due to objective inconsistency. Using insights from this analysis, we propose FedNova, a normalized averaging method that eliminates objective inconsistency while preserving fast error convergence. 

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2. Tackling Intertwined Data and Device Heterogeneities in Federated Learning with Unlimited Staleness

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i20.35405  

   Wang, Haoming; Gao, Wei (April 2025, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Federated Learning (FL) can be affected by data and device heterogeneities, caused by clients' different local data distributions and latencies in uploading model updates (i.e., staleness). Traditional schemes consider these heterogeneities as two separate and independent aspects, but this assumption is unrealistic in practical FL scenarios where these heterogeneities are intertwined. In these cases, traditional FL schemes are ineffective, and a better approach is to convert a stale model update into a unstale one. In this paper, we present a new FL framework that ensures the accuracy and computational efficiency of this conversion, hence effectively tackling the intertwined heterogeneities that may cause unlimited staleness in model updates. Our basic idea is to estimate the distributions of clients' local training data from their uploaded stale model updates, and use these estimations to compute unstale client model updates. In this way, our approach does not require any auxiliary dataset nor the clients' local models to be fully trained, and does not incur any additional computation or communication overhead at client devices. We compared our approach with the existing FL strategies on mainstream datasets and models, and showed that our approach can improve the trained model accuracy by up to 25% and reduce the number of required training epochs by up to 35%. 

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3. Federated Minimax Optimization with Client Heterogeneity

   Sharma, Pranay; Panda, Rohan; Joshi, Gauri (December 2023, Transactions on machine learning research)

   Minimax optimization has seen a surge in interest with the advent of modern applications such as GANs, and it is inherently more challenging than simple minimization. The difficulty is exacerbated by the training data residing at multiple edge devices or clients, especially when these clients can have heterogeneous datasets and heterogeneous local computation capabilities. We propose a general federated minimax optimization framework that subsumes such settings and several existing methods like Local SGDA. We show that naive aggregation of model updates made by clients running unequal number of local steps can result in optimizing a mismatched objective function – a phenomenon previously observed in standard federated minimization. To fix this problem, we propose normalizing the client updates by the number of local steps. We analyze the convergence of the proposed algorithm for classes of nonconvex-concave and nonconvex-nonconcave functions and characterize the impact of heterogeneous client data, partial client participation, and heterogeneous local computations. For all the function classes considered, we significantly improve the existing computation and communication complexity results. Experimental results support our theoretical claims. 

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4. Fedband: Adaptive Federated Learning with Bandwidth Constraints

   Alanazi, T; Fahim, A; Ibnath, M; Guler, B; Roy-Chowdhury, A; Swami, A; Papalexakis, E; Krishnamurthy, S (August 2025, IEEE International Conference on Computers Communications and Networks (ICCCN))

   Li, R; Chowdhury, K (Ed.)

   Federated Learning (FL) enables model training across decentralized clients while preserving data privacy. However, bandwidth constraints limit the volume of information exchanged, making communication efficiency a critical challenge. In addition, non- IID data distributions require fairness-aware mechanisms to prevent performance degradation for certain clients. Existing sparsification techniques often apply fixed compression ratios uniformly, ignoring variations in client importance and bandwidth. We propose FedBand, a dynamic bandwidth allocation framework that prioritizes clients based on their contribution to the global model. Unlike conventional approaches, FedBand does not enforce uniform client participation in every communication round. Instead, it allocates more bandwidth to clients whose local updates deviate significantly from the global model, enabling them to transmit a greater number of parameters. Clients with less impactful updates contribute proportionally less or may defer transmission, reducing unnecessary overhead while maintaining generalizability. By optimizing the trade-off between communication efficiency and learning performance, FedBand substantially reduces transmission costs while preserving model accuracy. Experiments on non-IID CIFAR-10 and UTMobileNet2021 datasets, demonstrate that FedBand achieves up to 99.81% bandwidth savings per round while maintaining accuracies close to that of an unsparsified model (80% on CIFAR- 10, 95% on UTMobileNet), despite transmitting less than 1% of the model parameters in each round. Moreover, FedBand accelerates convergence by 37.4%, further improving learning efficiency under bandwidth constraints. Mininet emulations further show a 42.6% reduction in communication costs and a 65.57% acceleration in convergence compared to baseline methods, validating its real-world efficiency. These results demonstrate that adaptive bandwidth allocation can significantly enhance the scalability and communication efficiency of federated learning, making it more viable for real- world, bandwidth-constrained networking environments. 

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5. Exploiting Shared Representations for Personalized Federated Learning

   Collins, Liam; Hassani, Hamed; Mokhtari, Aryan; Shakkottai, Sanjay (June 2021, ICML)

   Deep neural networks have shown the ability to extract universal feature representations from data such as images and text that have been useful for a variety of learning tasks. However, the fruits of representation learning have yet to be fully-realized in federated settings. Although data in federated settings is often non-i.i.d. across clients, the success of centralized deep learning suggests that data often shares a global feature representation, while the statistical heterogeneity across clients or tasks is concentrated in the labels. Based on this intuition, we propose a novel federated learning framework and algorithm for learning a shared data representation across clients and unique local heads for each client. Our algorithm harnesses the distributed computational power across clients to perform many local-updates with respect to the low-dimensional local parameters for every update of the representation. We prove that this method obtains linear convergence to the ground-truth representation with near-optimal sample complexity in a linear setting, demonstrating that it can efficiently reduce the problem dimension for each client. Further, we provide extensive experimental results demonstrating the improvement of our method over alternative personalized federated learning approaches in heterogeneous settings. 

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