Towards Energy-Aware Federated Learning via MARL: A Dual-Selection Approach for Model and Client

Although Federated Learning (FL) is promising in knowledge sharing for heterogeneous Artificial Intelligence of Thing (AIoT) devices, their training performance and energy efficacy are severely restricted in practical battery-driven scenarios due to the “wooden barrel effect” caused by the mismatch between homogeneous model paradigms and heterogeneous device capability. As a result, due to various kinds of differences among devices, it is hard for existing FL methods to conduct training effectively in energy-constrained scenarios, such as the battery constraints of devices. To tackle the above issues, we propose an energy-aware FL framework named DR-FL, which considers the energy constraints in both clients and heterogeneous deep learning models to enable energy-efficient FL. Unlike Vanilla FL, DR-FL adopts our proposed Muti-Agents Reinforcement Learning (MARL)-based dual-selection method, which allows participated devices to make contributions to the global model effectively and adaptively based on their computing capabilities and energy capacities in a MARL-based manner. Experiments conducted with various widely recognized datasets demonstrate that DR-FL has the capability to optimize the exchange of knowledge among diverse models in large-scale AIoT systems while adhering to energy limitations. Additionally, it improves the performance of each individual heterogeneous device's model.