Model Pruning Enables Efficient Federated Learning on Edge Devices

Federated learning is a recent approach for distributed model training without sharing the raw data of clients. It allows model training using the large amount of user data collected by edge and mobile devices, while preserving data privacy. A challenge in federated learning is that the devices usually have much lower computational power and communication bandwidth than machines in data centers. Training large-sized deep neural networks in such a federated setting can consume a large amount of time and resources. To overcome this challenge, we propose a method that integrates model pruning with federated learning in this paper, which includes initial model pruning at the server, further model pruning as part of the federated learning process, followed by the regular federated learning procedure. Our proposed approach can save the computation, communication, and storage costs compared to standard federated learning approaches. Extensive experiments on real edge devices validate the benefit of our proposed method.