CoCoFL: Communication- and Computation-Aware Federated Learning via Partial NN Freezing and Quantization
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Abstract (arXiv)
Devices participating in federated learning (FL) typically have heterogeneous communication, computation, and memory resources. However, in synchronous FL, all devices need to finish training by the same deadline dictated by the server. Our results show that training a smaller subset of the neural network (NN) at constrained devices, i.e., dropping neurons/filters as proposed by state of the art, is inefficient, preventing these devices to make an effective contribution to the model. This causes unfairness w.r.t the achievable accuracies of constrained devices, especially in cases with a skewed distribution of class labels across devices. We present a novel FL technique, CoCoFL, which maintains the full NN structure on all devices. To adapt to the devices' heterogeneous resources, CoCoFL freezes and quantizes selected layers, reducing communication, computation, and memory requirements, whereas other layers are still trained in full precision, enabling to reach a high accuracy. Thereby, CoCoFL efficiently utilizes the available resources on devices and allows constrained devices to make a significant contribution to the FL system, increasing fairness among participants (accuracy parity) and significantly improving the final accuracy of the model.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 31 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2022.
Builds on
31 of 44 references.
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19 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 2; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
7 papers.
- 2023Federated Learning for Computationally-Constrained Heterogeneous Devices: A Surveycited by 40
- 2023FLrce: Resource-Efficient Federated Learning with Early-Stopping Strategycited by 10
- 2024Why Go Full? Elevating Federated Learning Through Partial Network Updatescited by 6
- 2024Efficient Federated Finetuning of Tiny Transformers with Resource-Constrained Devicescited by 1
- 2025FedBiF: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning via Bits Freezingcited by 1
- 2025Energy and Memory-Efficient Federated Learning With Ordered Layer Freezingcited by 1
- 2026RIFLE: Robust Distillation-based FL for Deep Model Deployment on Resource-Constrained IoT Networkscited by 0
- 2026RIFLE: Robust Distillation-based FL for Deep Model Deployment on Resource-Constrained IoT Networks9 Feb 2026
- 2025Energy and Memory-Efficient Federated Learning With Ordered Layer Freezing29 Dec 2025
- 2025FedBiF: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning via Bits Freezing12 Sep 2025
- 2024Efficient Federated Finetuning of Tiny Transformers with Resource-Constrained Devices12 Nov 2024
- 2024Why Go Full? Elevating Federated Learning Through Partial Network Updates15 Oct 2024
- 2023FLrce: Resource-Efficient Federated Learning with Early-Stopping Strategy15 Oct 2023
- 2023Federated Learning for Computationally-Constrained Heterogeneous Devices: A Survey18 Jul 2023