One paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
One paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (IF 5.3). In Federated Learning (FL), the size of local models matters. On the one hand, it is logical to use large-capacity neural networks in pursuit of high performance. On the other hand, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are exceedingly parameter-hungry, which makes memory a significant bottleneck when training large-scale CNNs on hardware-constrained devices such as smartphones or wearables sensors. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) FL approaches either only test their convergence properties on tiny CNNs with inferior accuracy or assume clients have the adequate processing power to train large models, which remains a formidable obstacle in actual practice. To overcome these issues, we introduce FedDCT, a novel distributed learning paradigm that enables the usage of large, high-performance CNNs on resource-limited edge devices. As opposed to traditional FL approaches, which require each client to train the full-size neural network independently during each training round, the proposed FedDCT allows a cluster of several clients to collaboratively train a large deep learning model by dividing it into an ensemble of several small sub-models and train them on multiple devices in parallel while maintaining privacy. In this collaborative training process, clients from the same cluster can also learn from each other, further improving their ensemble performance. In the aggregation stage, the server takes a weighted average of all the ensemble models trained by all the clusters. FedDCT reduces the memory requirements and allows low-end devices to participate in FL. We empirically conduct extensive experiments on standardized datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and two real-world medical datasets HAM10000 and VAIPE. Experimental results show that FedDCT outperforms a set of current SOTA FL methods with interesting convergence behaviors. For more https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10247258
