# RIFLES: Resource-effIcient Federated LEarning via Scheduling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13169/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05492/) (2016)
- [Adaptive Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00295/) (2020)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Federated Learning in Resource Constrained Edge Computing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05271/) (2018)
- [Client Selection for Federated Learning with Heterogeneous Resources in Mobile Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08333/) (2018)
- [Client Selection in Federated Learning: Convergence Analysis and Power-of-Choice Selection Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01243/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning with Buffered Asynchronous Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06639/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Open Banking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10749/) (2021)
- [FedScale: Benchmarking Model and System Performance of Federated Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11367/) (2021)
- [Optimal Client Sampling for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13723/) (2020)
- [TiFL: A Tier-based Federated Learning System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09249/) (2020)
- [SAFA: a Semi-Asynchronous Protocol for Fast Federated Learning with Low Overhead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01355/) (2019)
- [Towards Flexible Device Participation in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06954/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning Under Intermittent Client Availability and Time-Varying Communication Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06730/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Clustering in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03788/) (2020)
- [Resource-Efficient Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01108/) (2021)
- [Robust Aggregation for Adaptive Privacy Preserving Federated Learning in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08294/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning technique that allows decentralized collaborative model training across a set of distributed clients, by avoiding raw data exchange. A fundamental component of FL is the selection of a subset of clients in each round for model training by a central server. Current selection strategies are myopic in nature in that they are based on past or current interactions, often leading to inefficiency issues such as straggling clients. In this paper, we address this serious shortcoming by proposing the RIFLES approach that builds a novel availability forecasting layer to support the client selection process. We make the following contributions: (i) we formalise the sequential selection problem and reduce it to a scheduling problem and show that the problem is NP-complete, (ii) leveraging heartbeat messages from clients, RIFLES build an availability prediction layer to support (long term) selection decisions, (iii) we propose a novel adaptive selection strategy to support efficient learning and resource usage. To circumvent the inherent exponential complexity, we present RIFLES, a heuristic that leverages clients' historical availability data by using a CNN-LSTM time series forecasting model, allowing the server to predict the optimal participation times of clients, thereby enabling informed selection decisions. By comparing against other FL techniques, we show that RIFLES provide significant improvement by between 10%-50% on a variety of metrics such as accuracy and test loss. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to investigate FL as a scheduling problem.