MAS: Towards Resource-Efficient Federated Multiple-Task Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces MAS, a novel federated learning system that efficiently trains multiple tasks simultaneously on resource-limited devices by merging and splitting tasks to optimize performance and resource usage.

Contribution

The paper proposes MAS, a new approach for federated multi-task learning that effectively manages resource constraints by merging and splitting tasks during training.

Findings

MAS reduces training time by 2x

MAS cuts energy consumption by 40%

MAS outperforms existing methods in multi-task federated learning

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning method that empowers in-situ model training on decentralized edge devices. However, multiple simultaneous FL tasks could overload resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose the first FL system to effectively coordinate and train multiple simultaneous FL tasks. We first formalize the problem of training simultaneous FL tasks. Then, we present our new approach, MAS (Merge and Split), to optimize the performance of training multiple simultaneous FL tasks. MAS starts by merging FL tasks into an all-in-one FL task with a multi-task architecture. After training for a few rounds, MAS splits the all-in-one FL task into two or more FL tasks by using the affinities among tasks measured during the all-in-one training. It then continues training each split of FL tasks based on model parameters from the all-in-one training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAS outperforms other methods while reducing training time by 2x and reducing energy consumption by 40%. We hope this work will inspire the community to further study and optimize training simultaneous FL tasks.