FedShift: Robust Federated Learning Aggregation Scheme in Resource Constrained Environment via Weight Shifting

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) commonly relies on a central server to coordinate training across distributed clients. While effective, this paradigm suffers from significant communication overhead, impacting overall training efficiency. To mitigate this, prior work has explored compression techniques such as quantization. However, in heterogeneous FL settings, clients may employ different quantization levels based on their hardware or network constraints, necessitating a mixed-precision aggregation process at the server. This introduces additional challenges, exacerbating client drift and leading to performance degradation. In this work, we propose FedShift, a novel aggregation methodology designed to mitigate performance degradation in FL scenarios with mixed quantization levels. FedShift employs a statistical matching mechanism based on weight shifting to align mixed-precision models, thereby reducing model divergence and addressing quantization-induced bias. Our approach functions as an add-on to existing FL optimization algorithms, enhancing their robustness and improving convergence. Empirical results demonstrate that FedShift effectively mitigates the negative impact of mixed-precision aggregation, yielding superior performance across various FL benchmarks.