Partial Variable Training for Efficient on-Device Federated Learning

©2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. ABSTRACT This paper aims to address the major challenges of Federated Learning (FL) on edge devices: limited memory and expensive communication. We propose a novel method, called Partial Variable Training (PVT), that only trains a small subset of variables on edge devices to reduce memory usage and communication cost. With PVT, we show that network accuracy can be maintained by utilizing more local training steps and devices, which is favorable for FL involving a large population of devices. According to our experiments on two stateof-the-art neural networks for speech recognition and two different datasets, PVT can reduce memory usage by up to 1.9× and communication cost by up to 593× while attaining comparable accuracy when compared with full network training.