Sparse Federated Learning with Hierarchical Personalization Models

Federated learning (FL) is widely used in the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless networks, mobile devices, autonomous vehicles, and human activity due to its excellent potential in cybersecurity and privacy security. Though FL method can achieve privacy-safe and reliable collaborative training without collecting users' privacy data, it suffers from many challenges during both training and deployment. The main challenges in FL are the difficulty of non-i.i.d co-training data caused by the statistical diversity of the data from various participants, and the difficulty of application deployment caused by the excessive traffic volume and long communication delay between the central server and the client. To address these problems, we propose a sparse FL scheme with hierarchical personalization models (sFedHP), which minimizes clients' loss functions including the properties of an approximated L1-norm and the hierarchical proximal mapping, to reduce the communicational and computational loads required in the network, while improving the performance on statistical diversity data. Convergence analysis shows that the sparse constraint in sFedHP only reduces the convergence speed to a small extent, while the communication cost is greatly reduced. Experimentally, we demonstrate the benefits of this sparse hierarchical personalization architecture compared with the client-edge-cloud hierarchical FedAvg and the state-of-the-art personalization methods.