FedEL: Federated Elastic Learning for Heterogeneous Devices

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Letian, Chen, Bo, Bian, Jieming, Wang, Lei, Xu, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912596627554304
author Zhang, Letian
Chen, Bo
Bian, Jieming
Wang, Lei
Xu, Jie
author_facet Zhang, Letian
Chen, Bo
Bian, Jieming
Wang, Lei
Xu, Jie
contents Federated learning (FL) enables distributed devices to collaboratively train machine learning models while maintaining data privacy. However, the heterogeneous hardware capabilities of devices often result in significant training delays, as straggler clients with limited resources prolong the aggregation process. Existing solutions such as client selection, asynchronous FL, and partial training partially address these challenges but encounter issues such as reduced accuracy, stale updates, and compromised model performance due to inconsistent training contributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose FedEL, a federated elastic learning framework that enhances training efficiency while maintaining model accuracy. FedEL introduces a novel window-based training process, sliding the window to locate the training part of the model and dynamically selecting important tensors for training within a coordinated runtime budget. This approach ensures progressive and balanced training across all clients, including stragglers. Additionally, FedEL employs a tensor importance adjustment module, harmonizing local and global tensor importance to mitigate biases caused by data heterogeneity. The experiment results show that FedEL achieves up to 3.87x improvement in time-to-accuracy compared to baselines while maintaining or exceeding final test accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_16902
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedEL: Federated Elastic Learning for Heterogeneous Devices
Zhang, Letian
Chen, Bo
Bian, Jieming
Wang, Lei
Xu, Jie
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Federated learning (FL) enables distributed devices to collaboratively train machine learning models while maintaining data privacy. However, the heterogeneous hardware capabilities of devices often result in significant training delays, as straggler clients with limited resources prolong the aggregation process. Existing solutions such as client selection, asynchronous FL, and partial training partially address these challenges but encounter issues such as reduced accuracy, stale updates, and compromised model performance due to inconsistent training contributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose FedEL, a federated elastic learning framework that enhances training efficiency while maintaining model accuracy. FedEL introduces a novel window-based training process, sliding the window to locate the training part of the model and dynamically selecting important tensors for training within a coordinated runtime budget. This approach ensures progressive and balanced training across all clients, including stragglers. Additionally, FedEL employs a tensor importance adjustment module, harmonizing local and global tensor importance to mitigate biases caused by data heterogeneity. The experiment results show that FedEL achieves up to 3.87x improvement in time-to-accuracy compared to baselines while maintaining or exceeding final test accuracy.
title FedEL: Federated Elastic Learning for Heterogeneous Devices
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16902