FS-Real: Towards Real-World Cross-Device Federated Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces FS-Real, a scalable system for real-world cross-device federated learning that handles device heterogeneity and large scales, enabling more practical FL research and applications.

Contribution

The paper presents FS-Real, a novel prototyping system supporting heterogeneous devices, scalability, and advanced FL features, bridging the gap between research and real-world FL scenarios.

Findings

Demonstrates system efficiency with various device distributions

Analyzes the impact of heterogeneity and scale on FL performance

Provides insights into real-world FL deployment challenges

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) aims to train high-quality models in collaboration with distributed clients while not uploading their local data, which attracts increasing attention in both academia and industry. However, there is still a considerable gap between the flourishing FL research and real-world scenarios, mainly caused by the characteristics of heterogeneous devices and its scales. Most existing works conduct evaluations with homogeneous devices, which are mismatched with the diversity and variability of heterogeneous devices in real-world scenarios. Moreover, it is challenging to conduct research and development at scale with heterogeneous devices due to limited resources and complex software stacks. These two key factors are important yet underexplored in FL research as they directly impact the FL training dynamics and final performance, making the effectiveness and usability of FL algorithms unclear. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose an efficient and scalable prototyping system for real-world cross-device FL, FS-Real. It supports heterogeneous device runtime, contains parallelism and robustness enhanced FL server, and provides implementations and extensibility for advanced FL utility features such as personalization, communication compression and asynchronous aggregation. To demonstrate the usability and efficiency of FS-Real, we conduct extensive experiments with various device distributions, quantify and analyze the effect of the heterogeneous device and various scales, and further provide insights and open discussions about real-world FL scenarios. Our system is released to help to pave the way for further real-world FL research and broad applications involving diverse devices and scales.