One-Shot Federated Learning With Lightweight Intermediate Models in Wireless Sensor Network Setting

FedOPAL: One-Shot Federated Learning via Analytic Visual Prompt Tuning

Experimental results show that FedOPAL not only significantly outperforms the original analytical methods on several benchmarks, but also achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art iterative methods while maintaining zero server-side training costs, providing a new engineering paradigm for efficient collaboration of large models on the edge.

Adaptive Heterogeneous Compression for Resource-Efficient Federated Knowledge Distillation

Federated learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving distributed model training but faces challenges from heterogeneous model architectures and limited communication resources at the network edge. Federated knowledge distillation (FedKD) alleviates model heterogeneity by combining prototype-wise parameter aggregation and knowledge transfer across heterogeneous models. However, transmitting gradients still introduces considerable communication overhead, while existing compression approaches typically apply a uniform strategy across clients and ignore their diverse model characteristics and resource capacities. To address this issue, we propose a heterogeneous compression framework for FedKD that enables each client to select a compression strategy from a candidate strategy set. We formulate the compression strategy selection problem as a non-stationary stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB), where each arm corresponds to a compression strategy. An efficiency-aware reward is designed by jointly considering local optimization improvement, global knowledge alignment, and execution time. Based on this formulation, we develop an Adaptive heterogeneouS Compression algorithm for fEderated kNowledge Distillation (ASCEND), which employs an exponential moving average (EMA)-enhanced $\epsilon$-greedy policy to balance exploration and exploitation. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that ASCEND effectively adapts to heterogeneous model and resource settings, reducing communication overhead and training time while maintaining competitive model accuracy.

Asymmetric Partial Model Transmission for Federated Edge Learning

Federated learning (FL) applications normally employ large deep learning (DL) models, resulting in excessive communication overhead in the deployment of FL over resource-constraint mobile edge networks. To achieve better scalability for DL-based FL, we capitalize on both the asymmetric nature of mobile networks and the distinct effects of partial transmissions on FL training for the global and local models. We propose Fed-DynAmal, an FL framework that decreases the number of parameters transmitted in the uplink (clients-to-server) while concurrently achieving better model performance. The underlying idea is that each selected client sends a partial DL model to the server by omitting several sub-blocks from the trained local model. Crucially, we drop the assumption that transmitted local models can still be used for inference, thereby allowing for greater model variability. At the server, we introduce amalgamation, a process to merge different partial local models into an inference-viable full model. Essentially, amalgamation is a bridge for performing aggregation at the sub-block level. Interestingly, as the key takeaway, communication efficiency versus model performance is not necessarily a trade-off in FL: Our extensive experiments show that Fed-DynAmal can effectively improve communication efficiency while still concurrently achieving higher accuracy and enhanced robustness.

Lightweight Aggregation Protocols for Green Federated Learning in Vehicle-to-Cloud Systems

When Split Federated Learning Meets Prototype Learning: A Communication-Efficient Approach in Wireless Networks

Nowadays, split federated learning (SFL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enabling privacy-preserving collaborative intelligence across heterogeneous devices with limited computation. However, SFL incurs significant communication overhead in wireless networks due to the uplink transmission of high-dimensional smashed data, which degrades network efficiency. To mitigate the communication bottleneck, we propose a prototype-based SFL framework ProtoSFL. Specifically, each selected client computes local prototypes for observed classes and uploads them to the server. Based on the received prototypes, the server derives global prototypes and optimizes a weighted objective that combines classification loss with prototype alignment loss. The server then updates the model accordingly and returns personalized prototype gradients to the clients. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of ProtoSFL in reducing communication overhead, achieving a substantial reduction in uplink communication, while maintaining competitive testing accuracy under various heterogeneous data settings compared with SFL baselines.

FedEdge-Adapt: Adaptive Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Edge AI Systems

Federated learning (FL) on heterogeneous edge networks faces a fundamental tension: standard aggregation protocols assume client homogeneity, yet real-world edge deployments span device tiers with $7 \times$ compute and $\mathbf{1 0} \times$ bandwidth disparities. Slow clients become stragglers that stall synchronous rounds, while uniform gradient compression degrades accuracy on bandwidth-constrained devices. This paper presents FedEdge-Adapt, a novel adaptive federated learning framework that jointly addresses device heterogeneity, straggler mitigation, and communication efficiency without sacrificing model quality. FedEdge-Adapt introduces three tightly coupled mechanisms: (1) tier-aware gradient compression that applies device-class-specific sparsification ratios, (2) drift-corrected aggregation that reweights client updates based on staleness and data heterogeneity, and (3) predictive client selection that anticipates dropout-prone devices using a lightweight resource oracle. We evaluate FedEdge-Adapt on a 30-node heterogeneous edge network over 150 communication rounds using the CIFAR-10 dataset under non-IID distributions ($\alpha=0.5$ Dirichlet) and compare against FedAvg, FedProx, and SCAFFOLD baselines. FedEdge-Adapt achieves 85.44% global accuracy, a 6.85 percentage-point improvement over FedAvg, while simultaneously reducing round latency by $\mathbf{6 7. 4 \%}$, communication overhead by $\mathbf{3 4. 0 \%}$, and client dropout rate by $\mathbf{5 4. 0 \%}$. Convergence is reached in 18 rounds versus 31 for FedAvg. Extended experiments across 100+ rounds confirm long-term stability with no late-stage divergence.