Towards Efficient Synchronous Federated Training: A Survey on System Optimization Strategies
It provides a comprehensive overview for developers and researchers working on privacy-preserving collaborative learning, but it is incremental as it surveys existing methods rather than introducing new ones.
This survey addresses the challenge of minimizing time-to-accuracy in synchronous federated learning by reviewing recent works on system optimization strategies, including client selection, configuration, and reporting phases, along with measurement studies and benchmarking tools.
The increasing demand for privacy-preserving collaborative learning has given rise to a new computing paradigm called federated learning (FL), in which clients collaboratively train a machine learning (ML) model without revealing their private training data. Given an acceptable level of privacy guarantee, the goal of FL is to minimize the time-to-accuracy of model training. Compared with distributed ML in data centers, there are four distinct challenges to achieving short time-to-accuracy in FL training, namely the lack of information for optimization, the tradeoff between statistical and system utility, client heterogeneity, and large configuration space. In this paper, we survey recent works in addressing these challenges and present them following a typical training workflow through three phases: client selection, configuration, and reporting. We also review system works including measurement studies and benchmarking tools that aim to support FL developers.