# Equitable-FL: Federated Learning with Sparsity for Resource-Constrained Environment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00864 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00864/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01878/) (2017)
- [Sparsity in Deep Learning: Pruning and growth for efficient inference and training in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00554/) (2021)
- [Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11134/) (2019)
- [Towards Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00710/) (2021)
- [Sparse Networks from Scratch: Faster Training without Losing Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04840/) (2019)
- [Deconstructing Lottery Tickets: Zeros, Signs, and the Supermask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01067/) (2019)
- [Proving the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Pruning is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00585/) (2020)
- [Federated Dynamic Sparse Training: Computing Less, Communicating Less, Yet Learning Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09824/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning Meets Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12603/) (2021)
- [DropNet: Reducing Neural Network Complexity via Iterative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06646/) (2022)
- [Federated Nonconvex Sparse Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00052/) (2020)
- [SparseNN: An Energy-Efficient Neural Network Accelerator Exploiting Input and Output Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01263/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In Federated Learning, model training is performed across multiple computing devices, where only parameters are shared with a common central server without exchanging their data instances. This strategy assumes abundance of resources on individual clients and utilizes these resources to build a richer model as user's models. However, when the assumption of the abundance of resources is violated, learning may not be possible as some nodes may not be able to participate in the process. In this paper, we propose a sparse form of federated learning that performs well in a Resource Constrained Environment. Our goal is to make learning possible, regardless of a node's space, computing, or bandwidth scarcity. The method is based on the observation that model size viz a viz available resources defines resource scarcity, which entails that reduction of the number of parameters without affecting accuracy is key to model training in a resource-constrained environment. In this work, the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis approach is utilized to progressively sparsify models to encourage nodes with resource scarcity to participate in collaborative training. We validate Equitable-FL on the MNIST, F-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 benchmark datasets, as well as the Brain-MRI data and the PlantVillage datasets. Further, we examine the effect of sparsity on performance, model size compaction, and speed-up for training. Results obtained from experiments performed for training convolutional neural networks validate the efficacy of Equitable-FL in heterogeneous resource-constrained learning environment.