# PracMHBench: Re-evaluating Model-Heterogeneous Federated Learning Based on Practical Edge Device Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08750 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08750/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01097/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02079/) (2021)
- [FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00243/) (2021)
- [HeteroFL: Computation and Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01264/) (2020)
- [FedDG: Federated Domain Generalization on Medical Image Segmentation via Episodic Learning in Continuous Frequency Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06030/) (2021)
- [FjORD: Fair and Accurate Federated Learning under heterogeneous targets with Ordered Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13451/) (2021)
- [FedScale: Benchmarking Model and System Performance of Federated Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11367/) (2021)
- [FedRolex: Model-Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Rolling Sub-Model Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01548/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneous Ensemble Knowledge Transfer for Training Large Models in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12703/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Evaluation of Federated Learning and Split Learning for Internet of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13376/) (2020)
- [FedBalancer: Data and Pace Control for Efficient Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Clients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01601/) (2022)
- [No One Left Behind: Inclusive Federated Learning over Heterogeneous Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08036/) (2022)
- [FedDUAP: Federated Learning with Dynamic Update and Adaptive Pruning Using Shared Data on the Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11536/) (2022)
- [Federated Few-Shot Learning for Mobile NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05974/) (2022)
- [FedEval: A Holistic Evaluation Framework for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09655/) (2020)
- [Memory-adaptive Depth-wise Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04887/) (2023)
- [DistFL: Distribution-aware Federated Learning for Mobile Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11619/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federating heterogeneous models on edge devices with diverse resource constraints has been a notable trend in recent years. Compared to traditional federated learning (FL) that assumes an identical model architecture to cooperate, model-heterogeneous FL is more practical and flexible since the model can be customized to satisfy the deployment requirement. Unfortunately, no prior work ever dives into the existing model-heterogeneous FL algorithms under the practical edge device constraints and provides quantitative analysis on various data scenarios and metrics, which motivates us to rethink and re-evaluate this paradigm. In our work, we construct the first system platform PracMHBench to evaluate model-heterogeneous FL on practical constraints of edge devices, where diverse model heterogeneity algorithms are classified and tested on multiple data tasks and metrics. Based on the platform, we perform extensive experiments on these algorithms under the different edge constraints to observe their applicability and the corresponding heterogeneity pattern.