FLEXFL: Flexible Federated Learning for Customized Network Architectures in 6G

With the continuous and fast-changing land-scape in communication networks and artificial intelligence (AI), the researchers are interested in expedited standardization and realization of 6G networks. Federated learning (FL) is one of the paradigms that allows the 6G networks to support a diverse range of devices. Very few studies address the problem of flexibility and heterogeneity for AI network architectures in FL paradigm, that could be a potential key changer for standardization and realization of 6G networks. However, they either consider width-only or depth-only to provide flexibility support. Furthermore, the existing studies do not address the problem of weight scale variation while performing the global model aggregation at the server side. In this regard, we propose flexible federated learning (FLEXFL) for the support of heterogeneous AI network architectures in 6G communication systems. The proposed network not only considers the width but also the depth of the network architecture to make it compliant with the global model aggregation. We also address weight scale variation (WSV) while updating the global model with weight normalization, which is one of the problems associated with existing studies. We perform experimental analysis on two publicly available datasets and a few network architectures to show the efficacy of the proposed approach. The results reveal that the FLEXFL outperforms existing state-of-the-art works in both the IID and non-IID settings, accordingly.