FAST: A Lightweight Mechanism Unleashing Arbitrary Client Participation in Federated Learning

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) provides a flexible distributed platform where numerous clients with high data and system heterogeneity can collaborate to learn a model. While previous research has shown that FL can handle diverse data, it often completely assumes idealized conditions. In practice, real-world factors make it hard to predict or design individual client participation. This complexity results in an unknown participation pattern - arbitrary client participation (ACP). Hence, the key open problem is to understand the impact of client participation and develop a lightweight mechanism to support ACP in FL. In this paper, we first empirically investigate the client participation's influence in FL, revealing that FL algorithms are adversely impacted by ACP. To alleviate the impact, we propose a lightweight solution, Federated Average with Snapshot (FAST), that supports almost ACP for FL and can seamlessly integrate with other classic FL algorithms. Specifically, FAST enforces clients to take a snapshot once in a while and facilitates ACP for the majority of training processes. We prove that the convergence rates of FAST in non-convex and strongly-convex cases match those under ideal client participation. Furthermore, we empirically introduce an adaptive strategy to dynamically configure the snapshot frequency, tailored to accommodate diverse FL systems. Extensive experiments show that FAST significantly improves performance under ACP and high data heterogeneity.