Towards Communication-Efficient Federated Graph Learning: An Adaptive Client Selection Perspective

Federated graph learning (FGL) has been proposed to collaboratively train the increasing graph data with graph neural networks (GNNs) in a recommendation system, aggregating the features of graph nodes and edges among these nodes. Nevertheless, implementing an efficient recommendation system with FGL still faces two primary challenges, i.e., limited communication bandwidth and non-IID local graph data. Existing works typically reduce communication frequency or transmission amount, which may suffer significant performance degradation under non-IID settings. Furthermore, some researchers propose to share the underlying structure information among all clients, which brings massive communication cost. To this end, we propose an efficient FGL framework, named FedACS, which adaptively selects a subset of clients for model training, to alleviate communication overhead and non-IID issues simultaneously. In FedACS, the global GNN model can learn significant hidden edges and the structure of graph data among selected clients, enhancing recommendation efficiency. This capability distinguishes it from the traditional FL client selection methods. To optimize the client selection process, we introduce a multi-armed bandit (MAB) based algorithm to select participating clients according to the resource budgets and the training performance (i.e., RMSE) under different data distributions. Experimental results show that, given the same resource budget, FedACS achieves the RMSE improvement of 5.4% over the baselines. Besides, when achieving the same RMSE performance, FedACS saves up to approximately 70.7% communication cost, compared with the baselines.