English

FedAST: Federated Asynchronous Simultaneous Training

Machine Learning 2024-06-05 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) enables edge devices or clients to collaboratively train machine learning (ML) models without sharing their private data. Much of the existing work in FL focuses on efficiently learning a model for a single task. In this paper, we study simultaneous training of multiple FL models using a common set of clients. The few existing simultaneous training methods employ synchronous aggregation of client updates, which can cause significant delays because large models and/or slow clients can bottleneck the aggregation. On the other hand, a naive asynchronous aggregation is adversely affected by stale client updates. We propose FedAST, a buffered asynchronous federated simultaneous training algorithm that overcomes bottlenecks from slow models and adaptively allocates client resources across heterogeneous tasks. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for FedAST for smooth non-convex objective functions. Extensive experiments over multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing simultaneous FL approaches, achieving up to 46.0% reduction in time to train multiple tasks to completion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.00302,
  title  = {FedAST: Federated Asynchronous Simultaneous Training},
  author = {Baris Askin and Pranay Sharma and Carlee Joe-Wong and Gauri Joshi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.00302},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted to UAI 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:49:22.624Z