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Main Authors: Wallach, Eleanor, Siler, Sage, Deng, Jing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08198
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author Wallach, Eleanor
Siler, Sage
Deng, Jing
author_facet Wallach, Eleanor
Siler, Sage
Deng, Jing
contents Federated Learning (FL) has been introduced as a way to keep data local to clients while training a shared machine learning model, as clients train on their local data and send trained models to a central aggregator. It is expected that FL will have a huge implication on Mobile Edge Computing, the Internet of Things, and Cross-Silo FL. In this paper, we focus on the widely used FedAvg algorithm to explore the effect of the number of clients in FL. We find a significant deterioration of learning accuracy for FedAvg as the number of clients increases. To address this issue for a general application, we propose a method called Knowledgeable Client Insertion (KCI) that introduces a very small number of knowledgeable clients to the MEC setting. These knowledgeable clients are expected to have accumulated a large set of data samples to help with training. With the help of KCI, the learning accuracy of FL increases much faster even with a normal FedAvg aggregation technique. We expect this approach to be able to provide great privacy protection for clients against security attacks such as model inversion attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Eleanor-W/KCI_for_FL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_08198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The More is not the Merrier: Investigating the Effect of Client Size on Federated Learning
Wallach, Eleanor
Siler, Sage
Deng, Jing
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Federated Learning (FL) has been introduced as a way to keep data local to clients while training a shared machine learning model, as clients train on their local data and send trained models to a central aggregator. It is expected that FL will have a huge implication on Mobile Edge Computing, the Internet of Things, and Cross-Silo FL. In this paper, we focus on the widely used FedAvg algorithm to explore the effect of the number of clients in FL. We find a significant deterioration of learning accuracy for FedAvg as the number of clients increases. To address this issue for a general application, we propose a method called Knowledgeable Client Insertion (KCI) that introduces a very small number of knowledgeable clients to the MEC setting. These knowledgeable clients are expected to have accumulated a large set of data samples to help with training. With the help of KCI, the learning accuracy of FL increases much faster even with a normal FedAvg aggregation technique. We expect this approach to be able to provide great privacy protection for clients against security attacks such as model inversion attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Eleanor-W/KCI_for_FL.
title The More is not the Merrier: Investigating the Effect of Client Size on Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08198