Real-Time Federated Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning approach to privacy preservation and two major technical challenges prevent a wider application of federated learning. One is that federated learning raises high demands on communication resources, since a large number of model parameters must be transmitted between the server and clients. The other challenge is that training large machine learning models such as deep neural networks in federated learning requires a large amount of computational resources, which may be unrealistic for edge devices such as mobile phones. The problem becomes worse when deep neural architecture search (NAS) is to be carried out in federated learning. To address the above challenges, we propose an evolutionary approach to real-time federated NAS that not only optimizes the model performance but also reduces the local payload. During the search, a double-sampling technique is introduced, in which for each individual, only a randomly sampled submodel is transmitted to a number of randomly sampled clients for training. This way, we effectively reduce computational and communication costs required for evolutionary optimization, making the proposed framework well suitable for real-time federated NAS.