arXiv Machine Learning

Pathwise Individual Rationality in Federated Learning: A Mechanism-Architecture Co-Design

The paper investigates the trade‑off between the costs of participating in federated learning (privacy, communication, compute) and the potential gains in model performance, framing this as a game‑theoretic problem of individual rationality versus autarky. It shows that clients can remain below their local‑training baseline for many rounds and that simply capping per‑round contributions harms learning. The authors propose a new mechanism that provides short‑term participation guarantees and personalized model evaluation, demonstrating theoretically and empirically that clients can avoid short‑term losses without significantly harming overall performance, even under moderate heterogeneity.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Beyond Non-IID: Learner--Client Distribution Mismatch in Federated Learning

The paper addresses the mismatch between learner and client data distributions in federated learning, noting that traditional client selection methods often ignore this misalignment. It introduces a dynamic, influence-aware client selection framework that uses a small proxy dataset to estimate each client's utility for the learner’s objective, prioritizing informative sources while mitigating noise and heterogeneity. Experiments on CIFAR-10 with heterogeneous partitions show the proposed method outperforms static and dynamic baselines, achieving faster convergence and higher accuracy.

By Yiming Xie, Lili Su, Ningfang Mi