arXiv:2511.19966cs.LGcs.DC2025-11

让慢速客户端也能贡献价值,通过不确定性评估提升异步联邦学习性能

Stragglers Can Contribute More: Uncertainty-Aware Distillation for Asynchronous Federated Learning

  • 基于预测不确定性动态调整慢客户端的权重
  • 在高延迟和数据异构下显著提升模型准确率
  • 无需访问客户端私有数据,适合实际部署

异步联邦学习因效率与可扩展性受到关注,允许客户端自主上传更新而无需等待慢速参与者。但该设计面临显著挑战:慢速客户端的过时更新可能损害整体模型性能,且快速客户端在数据异构下易主导学习过程。现有方法通常仅解决其中一问题,导致缓解过时更新会加剧快速客户端偏倚,反之亦然。为此,本文提出FedEcho框架,引入不确定性感知蒸馏机制,使服务器能评估慢速客户端预测的可靠性,并根据估计不确定性动态调整其影响。通过优先采纳更确定的预测,同时保留所有客户端的多样性信息,FedEcho有效缓解了过时更新与数据异构的负面影响。大量实验表明,FedEcho持续优于现有异步联邦学习基线,在无需访问私有客户端数据的前提下实现稳健性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Asynchronous federated learning (FL) has recently gained attention for its enhanced efficiency and scalability, enabling local clients to send model updates to the server at their own pace without waiting for slower participants. However, such a design encounters significant challenges, such as the risk of outdated updates from straggler clients degrading the overall model performance and the potential bias introduced by faster clients dominating the learning process, especially under heterogeneous data distributions. Existing methods typically address only one of these issues, creating a conflict where mitigating the impact of outdated updates can exacerbate the bias created by faster clients, and vice versa. To address these challenges, we propose FedEcho, a novel framework that incorporates uncertainty-aware distillation to enhance the asynchronous FL performances under large asynchronous delays and data heterogeneity. Specifically, uncertainty-aware distillation enables the server to assess the reliability of predictions made by straggler clients, dynamically adjusting the influence of these predictions based on their estimated uncertainty. By prioritizing more certain predictions while still leveraging the diverse information from all clients, FedEcho effectively mitigates the negative impacts of outdated updates and data heterogeneity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FedEcho consistently outperforms existing asynchronous federated learning baselines, achieving robust performance without requiring access to private client data.

联邦学习异步训练不确定性建模

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