FedDRL: Deep reinforcement learning-based adaptive aggregation for non-IID data in federated learning

Abstract

The uneven distribution of local data across different edge devices (clients) results in slow model training and accuracy reduction in federated learning. Naive federated learning (FL) strategy and most alternative solutions attempted to achieve more fairness by weighted aggregating deep learning models across clients. This work introduces a novel non-IID type encountered in real-world datasets, namely cluster-skew, in which groups of clients have local data with similar distributions, causing the global model to converge to an over-fitted solution. To deal with non-IID data, particularly the cluster-skewed data, we propose FedDRL, a novel FL model that employs deep reinforcement learning to adaptively determine each client’s impact factor (which will be used as the weights in the aggregation process). Extensive experiments on a suite of federated datasets confirm that the proposed FedDRL improves favorably against FedAvg and FedProx methods, e.g., up to 4.05% and 2.17% on average for the CIFAR-100 dataset, respectively.