aiqbench analysis
This research addresses a core bottleneck in Federated Learning by proposing a client-selection strategy that groups devices into social coalitions to reduce update variance and accelerate convergence. Theoretically grounded with spectral clustering techniques inspired by homophily, the method demonstrates improved accuracy over existing heterogeneity-aware baselines while maintaining standard privacy guarantees.
Tackling Heterogeneity in Federated Learning via Variance-Reduced Boltzmann Sampling within Homogeneous Social Coalitions
arXiv:2506.02897v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative model training, but its effectiveness is often limited by client data heterogeneity. We introduce a client-selection algorithm that (i) dynamically forms nonoverlapping coalitions of clients based on asymptotic agreement and (ii) selects one representative from each coalition to minimize the variance of model updates. Our approach is inspired by social-network modeling, leveraging homophily-based proximity matrices for spectral clustering and techniques for identifying the most informative individuals to estimate a group's aggregate opinion. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for the algorithm under mild, standard FL assumptions. Finally, we validate our approach by benchmarking it against three strong heterogeneity-aware baselines; the results show higher accuracy and faster convergence, indicating that the framework is both theoretically grounded and effective in practice.
Abstract:Federated Learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative model training, but its effectiveness is often limited by client data heterogeneity. We introduce a client-selection algorithm that (i) dynamically forms nonoverlapping coalitions of clients based on asymptotic agreement and (ii) selects one representative from each coalition to minimize the variance of model updates. Our approach is inspired by social-network modeling, leveraging homophily-based proximity matrices for spectral clustering and techniques for identifying the most informative individuals to estimate a group's aggregate opinion. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for the algorithm under mild, standard FL assumptions. Finally, we validate our approach by benchmarking it against three strong heterogeneity-aware baselines; the results show higher accuracy and faster convergence, indicating that the framework is both theoretically grounded and effective in practice.
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2506.02897 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2506.02897v3 [cs.LG] for this version)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 135 words
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