Resource-Adaptive Federated Learning with All-In-One Neural Composition
Authors: Yiqun Mei, Pengfei Guo, Mo Zhou, Vishal Patel

Conventional Federated Learning (FL) systems inherently assume a uniform processing capacity among clients for deployed models.  However, diverse client hardware often leads to varying computation resources in practice. Such system heterogeneity results in an inevitable trade-off between model complexity and data accessibility as a bottleneck. To avoid such a dilemma and achieve resource-adaptive federated learning, we introduce a simple yet effective mechanism, termed All-In-One Neural Composition, to systematically support training complexity-adjustable models with flexible resource adaption. It is able to efficiently construct models at various complexities using one unified neural basis shared among clients, instead of pruning the global model into local ones. The proposed mechanism endows the system with unhindered access to the full range of knowledge scattered across clients and generalizes existing pruning-based solutions by allowing soft and learnable extraction of low footprint models. Extensive experiment results on popular FL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The resulting FL system empowered by our All-In-One Neural Composition, called FLANC, manifests consistent performance gains across diverse system/data heterogeneous setups while keeping high efficiency in computation and communication.