A Full Compression Pipeline for Green Federated Learning in Communication-Constrained Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Colybes, Elouan, Salehi, Shirin, Schmeink, Anke
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Colybes, Elouan
Salehi, Shirin
Schmeink, Anke
author_facet Colybes, Elouan
Salehi, Shirin
Schmeink, Anke
contents Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, thereby preserving privacy. However, FL often suffers from significant communication and computational overhead, limiting its scalability and sustainability. In this work, we introduce a Full Compression Pipeline (FCP) for FL in communication-constrained environments. FCP integrates three complementary deep compression techniques (pruning, quantization, and Huffman encoding) into a unified end-to-end framework. By compressing local models and communication payloads, FCP substantially reduces transmission costs and resource consumption while maintaining competitive accuracy. To quantify its impact, we develop an evaluation framework that captures both communication and computation overheads as a unified model cost, allowing a holistic assessment of efficiency trade-offs. The pipeline is evaluated in an independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID data setting. In one representative scenario, training a ResNet-12 model on the CIFAR-10 dataset with ten clients and a 2 Mbps bandwidth, the FCP achieves more than 11$\times$ reduction in model size, with only a 2% drop in accuracy compared to the uncompressed baseline. This results in an FL training that is more than 60% faster.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11146
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Full Compression Pipeline for Green Federated Learning in Communication-Constrained Environments
Colybes, Elouan
Salehi, Shirin
Schmeink, Anke
Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
I.2.11; E.2
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, thereby preserving privacy. However, FL often suffers from significant communication and computational overhead, limiting its scalability and sustainability. In this work, we introduce a Full Compression Pipeline (FCP) for FL in communication-constrained environments. FCP integrates three complementary deep compression techniques (pruning, quantization, and Huffman encoding) into a unified end-to-end framework. By compressing local models and communication payloads, FCP substantially reduces transmission costs and resource consumption while maintaining competitive accuracy. To quantify its impact, we develop an evaluation framework that captures both communication and computation overheads as a unified model cost, allowing a holistic assessment of efficiency trade-offs. The pipeline is evaluated in an independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID data setting. In one representative scenario, training a ResNet-12 model on the CIFAR-10 dataset with ten clients and a 2 Mbps bandwidth, the FCP achieves more than 11$\times$ reduction in model size, with only a 2% drop in accuracy compared to the uncompressed baseline. This results in an FL training that is more than 60% faster.
title A Full Compression Pipeline for Green Federated Learning in Communication-Constrained Environments
topic Machine Learning
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
I.2.11; E.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11146