HeteRo-Select: Informativeness as the Participation Driver in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Abstract:Federated learning systems typically allocate gradient compression by link speed. This is sensible when bandwidth and data informativeness align. However, under non-IID data, these signals often decorrelate or invert. A bandwidth-driven allocator then risks compressing the most informative gradients hardest. We propose HeteRo-Select, a framework that replaces bandwidth with a per-client informativeness score as the primary driver of compression. The score jointly governs three decisions per round: client selection, compression ratio, and server aggregation weight, with bandwidth retained only as a hard ceiling. Score-proportional selection provably reduces the effective heterogeneity of the chosen subset; score-proportional compression provably lowers aggregate top-$k$ error at fixed traffic. Under the exact FedCG simulation protocol, HeteRo-Select delivers a $1.78\times$ speedup and an $18.2\%$ reduction in traffic on CIFAR-10. The same configuration, unchanged, scales from a $7{,}850$-parameter logistic regression to an $11.27$M-parameter ResNet-18, hitting the accuracy target on three of four benchmarks. When bandwidth and informativeness are deliberately anti-correlated, the method still achieves the target accuracy with less traffic than the normal-bandwidth run.

IEEE ICDM (November 12-15, 2026), Shenyang, China. 10 pages, 7 figures

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2508.06692 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2508.06692v3 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.06692 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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