# FedStaleWeight: Buffered Asynchronous Federated Learning with Fair Aggregation via Staleness Reweighting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02877 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02877/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [Parallel Restarted SGD with Faster Convergence and Less Communication: Demystifying Why Model Averaging Works for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06629/) (2018)
- [Asynchronous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03934/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning with Buffered Asynchronous Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06639/) (2021)
- [Practical Secure Aggregation for Federated Learning on User-Held Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04482/) (2016)
- [Papaya: Practical, Private, and Scalable Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04877/) (2021)
- [SAFA: a Semi-Asynchronous Protocol for Fast Federated Learning with Low Overhead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01355/) (2019)
- [On Large-Cohort Training for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07820/) (2021)
- [FastSecAgg: Scalable Secure Aggregation for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11248/) (2020)
- [Incentive Mechanisms for Federated Learning: From Economic and Game Theoretic Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11850/) (2021)
- [Asynchronous Federated Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03626/) (2023)
- [Asynchronous Federated Learning with Reduced Number of Rounds and with Differential Privacy from Less Aggregated Gaussian Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09208/) (2020)
- [AsyncFedED: Asynchronous Federated Learning with Euclidean Distance based Adaptive Weight Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13797/) (2022)
- [A General Theory for Federated Optimization with Asynchronous and Heterogeneous Clients Updates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10189/) (2022)
- [Secure Aggregation for Buffered Asynchronous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02177/) (2021)
- [Pisces: Efficient Federated Learning via Guided Asynchronous Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09264/) (2022)
- [Towards More Suitable Personalization in Federated Learning via Decentralized Partial Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15157/) (2023)
- [Private Weighted Sum Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10640/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SyncFed: Time-Aware Federated Learning through Explicit Timestamping and Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09660/) (2025)
- [FedOptima: Optimizing Resource Utilization in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13850/) (2025)
- [SCOPE: Semantic Coreset with Orthogonal Projection Embeddings for Federated learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12976/) (2026)
- [AlignFed: Alignment-Aware Asynchronous Federated Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models in Heterogeneous Edge Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08197/) (2026)
- [FedSteer: Taming Extreme Gradient Staleness in Federated Learning with Corrective Projections and Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10124/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated Learning (FL) endeavors to harness decentralized data while preserving privacy, facing challenges of performance, scalability, and collaboration. Asynchronous Federated Learning (AFL) methods have emerged as promising alternatives to their synchronous counterparts bounded by the slowest agent, yet they add additional challenges in convergence guarantees, fairness with respect to compute heterogeneity, and incorporation of staleness in aggregated updates. Specifically, AFL biases model training heavily towards agents who can produce updates faster, leaving slower agents behind, who often also have differently distributed data which is not learned by the global model. Naively upweighting introduces incentive issues, where true fast updating agents may falsely report updates at a slower speed to increase their contribution to model training. We introduce FedStaleWeight, an algorithm addressing fairness in aggregating asynchronous client updates by employing average staleness to compute fair re-weightings. FedStaleWeight reframes asynchronous federated learning aggregation as a mechanism design problem, devising a weighting strategy that incentivizes truthful compute speed reporting without favoring faster update-producing agents by upweighting agent updates based on staleness. Leveraging only observed agent update staleness, FedStaleWeight results in more equitable aggregation on a per-agent basis. We both provide theoretical convergence guarantees in the smooth, non-convex setting and empirically compare FedStaleWeight against the commonly used asynchronous FedBuff with gradient averaging, demonstrating how it achieves stronger fairness, expediting convergence to a higher global model accuracy. Finally, we provide an open-source test bench to facilitate exploration of buffered AFL aggregation strategies, fostering further research in asynchronous federated learning paradigms.