# Multi-Worker Selection based Distributed Swarm Learning for Edge IoT with Non-i.i.d. Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18367 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18367/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning with Non-IID Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00582/) (2018)
- [Measuring the Effects of Non-Identical Data Distribution for Federated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06335/) (2019)
- [Curse or Redemption? How Data Heterogeneity Affects the Robustness of Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00655/) (2021)
- [Wasserstein Distance Rivals Kullback-Leibler Divergence for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08139/) (2024)
- [Joint Optimization of Communications and Federated Learning Over the Air](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03490/) (2021)
- [1-Bit Compressive Sensing for Efficient Federated Learning Over the Air](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16055/) (2021)
- [Experimenting with Normalization Layers in Federated Learning on non-IID scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10630/) (2023)
- [CB-DSL: Communication-efficient and Byzantine-robust Distributed Swarm Learning on Non-i.i.d. Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05578/) (2022)
- [Distributed Swarm Learning for Edge Internet of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20188/) (2024)
- [QC-ODKLA: Quantized and Communication-Censored Online Decentralized Kernel Learning via Linearized ADMM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02777/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in distributed swarm learning (DSL) offer a promising paradigm for edge Internet of Things. Such advancements enhance data privacy, communication efficiency, energy saving, and model scalability. However, the presence of non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) data pose a significant challenge for multi-access edge computing, degrading learning performance and diverging training behavior of vanilla DSL. Further, there still lacks theoretical guidance on how data heterogeneity affects model training accuracy, which requires thorough investigation. To fill the gap, this paper first study the data heterogeneity by measuring the impact of non-i.i.d. datasets under the DSL framework. This then motivates a new multi-worker selection design for DSL, termed M-DSL algorithm, which works effectively with distributed heterogeneous data. A new non-i.i.d. degree metric is introduced and defined in this work to formulate the statistical difference among local datasets, which builds a connection between the measure of data heterogeneity and the evaluation of DSL performance. In this way, our M-DSL guides effective selection of multiple works who make prominent contributions for global model updates. We also provide theoretical analysis on the convergence behavior of our M-DSL, followed by extensive experiments on different heterogeneous datasets and non-i.i.d. data settings. Numerical results verify performance improvement and network intelligence enhancement provided by our M-DSL beyond the benchmarks.