Optimized Federated Knowledge Distillation with Distributed Neural Architecture Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Medjadji, Chaimaa, Kubler, Sylvain, Traon, Yves Le, Leduc, Guilain, Alawadi, Sadi, Awaysheh, Feras M.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Medjadji, Chaimaa
Kubler, Sylvain
Traon, Yves Le
Leduc, Guilain
Alawadi, Sadi
Awaysheh, Feras M.
author_facet Medjadji, Chaimaa
Kubler, Sylvain
Traon, Yves Le
Leduc, Guilain
Alawadi, Sadi
Awaysheh, Feras M.
contents Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing data. However, real-world deployments must simultaneously address statistical heterogeneity across client data (non-IID), system heterogeneity in device capabilities, and communication efficiency. Existing FL approaches mitigate these challenges through improved aggregation, personalization, or knowledge distillation, but they almost universally assume a fixed client architecture, limiting adaptability to heterogeneous data complexity and hardware constraints. This architectural constraint often leads to suboptimal trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency in real-world FL systems. This work introduces FedKDNAS, a distillation-driven FL framework that combines client-side neural architecture selection with distillation of server-coordinated knowledge. Each client autonomously selects a lightweight model under accuracy-resource constraints. It then trains it locally using a hybrid objective combining supervised learning and knowledge distillation and shares only predictions on a public reference set. The server then aggregates and smooths these predictions, optionally combining them with a teacher model, to produce stable distillation targets for the next round. Extensive evaluation on six datasets against six representative FL baselines (FedAvg, Ditto, FedMD, FedDF, FedDistill, Local-KD) demonstrates that FedKDNAS consistently achieves superior Pareto efficiency, improving accuracy by up to 15\% under non-IID conditions, reducing client CPU usage by approximately 28\%, and decreasing communication overhead by up to 44 times while maintaining lightweight logit-based communication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_21322
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimized Federated Knowledge Distillation with Distributed Neural Architecture Search
Medjadji, Chaimaa
Kubler, Sylvain
Traon, Yves Le
Leduc, Guilain
Alawadi, Sadi
Awaysheh, Feras M.
Machine Learning
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing data. However, real-world deployments must simultaneously address statistical heterogeneity across client data (non-IID), system heterogeneity in device capabilities, and communication efficiency. Existing FL approaches mitigate these challenges through improved aggregation, personalization, or knowledge distillation, but they almost universally assume a fixed client architecture, limiting adaptability to heterogeneous data complexity and hardware constraints. This architectural constraint often leads to suboptimal trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency in real-world FL systems. This work introduces FedKDNAS, a distillation-driven FL framework that combines client-side neural architecture selection with distillation of server-coordinated knowledge. Each client autonomously selects a lightweight model under accuracy-resource constraints. It then trains it locally using a hybrid objective combining supervised learning and knowledge distillation and shares only predictions on a public reference set. The server then aggregates and smooths these predictions, optionally combining them with a teacher model, to produce stable distillation targets for the next round. Extensive evaluation on six datasets against six representative FL baselines (FedAvg, Ditto, FedMD, FedDF, FedDistill, Local-KD) demonstrates that FedKDNAS consistently achieves superior Pareto efficiency, improving accuracy by up to 15\% under non-IID conditions, reducing client CPU usage by approximately 28\%, and decreasing communication overhead by up to 44 times while maintaining lightweight logit-based communication.
title Optimized Federated Knowledge Distillation with Distributed Neural Architecture Search
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21322