Mitigating Participation Imbalance Bias in Asynchronous Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chang, Xiangyu, Yao, Manyi, Krishnamurthy, Srikanth V., Shelton, Christian R., Chakraborty, Anirban, Swami, Ananthram, Oymak, Samet, Roy-Chowdhury, Amit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chang, Xiangyu
Yao, Manyi
Krishnamurthy, Srikanth V.
Shelton, Christian R.
Chakraborty, Anirban
Swami, Ananthram
Oymak, Samet
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit
author_facet Chang, Xiangyu
Yao, Manyi
Krishnamurthy, Srikanth V.
Shelton, Christian R.
Chakraborty, Anirban
Swami, Ananthram
Oymak, Samet
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit
contents In Asynchronous Federated Learning (AFL), the central server immediately updates the global model with each arriving client's contribution. As a result, clients perform their local training on different model versions, causing information staleness (delay). In federated environments with non-IID local data distributions, this asynchronous pattern amplifies the adverse effect of client heterogeneity (due to different data distribution, local objectives, etc.), as faster clients contribute more frequent updates, biasing the global model. We term this phenomenon heterogeneity amplification. Our work provides a theoretical analysis that maps AFL design choices to their resulting error sources when heterogeneity amplification occurs. Guided by our analysis, we propose ACE (All-Client Engagement AFL), which mitigates participation imbalance through immediate, non-buffered updates that use the latest information available from all clients. We also introduce a delay-aware variant, ACED, to balance client diversity against update staleness. Experiments on different models for different tasks across diverse heterogeneity and delay settings validate our analysis and demonstrate the robust performance of our approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19066
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Participation Imbalance Bias in Asynchronous Federated Learning
Chang, Xiangyu
Yao, Manyi
Krishnamurthy, Srikanth V.
Shelton, Christian R.
Chakraborty, Anirban
Swami, Ananthram
Oymak, Samet
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
In Asynchronous Federated Learning (AFL), the central server immediately updates the global model with each arriving client's contribution. As a result, clients perform their local training on different model versions, causing information staleness (delay). In federated environments with non-IID local data distributions, this asynchronous pattern amplifies the adverse effect of client heterogeneity (due to different data distribution, local objectives, etc.), as faster clients contribute more frequent updates, biasing the global model. We term this phenomenon heterogeneity amplification. Our work provides a theoretical analysis that maps AFL design choices to their resulting error sources when heterogeneity amplification occurs. Guided by our analysis, we propose ACE (All-Client Engagement AFL), which mitigates participation imbalance through immediate, non-buffered updates that use the latest information available from all clients. We also introduce a delay-aware variant, ACED, to balance client diversity against update staleness. Experiments on different models for different tasks across diverse heterogeneity and delay settings validate our analysis and demonstrate the robust performance of our approaches.
title Mitigating Participation Imbalance Bias in Asynchronous Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19066