Optimizing Asynchronous Federated Learning: A Delicate Trade-Off Between Model-Parameter Staleness and Update Frequency

Synchronous federated learning (FL) scales poorly with the number of clients due to the straggler effect. Algorithms like FedAsync and GeneralizedFedAsync address this limitation by enabling asynchronous communication between clients and the central server. In this work, we rely on stochastic modeling to better understand the impact of design choices in asynchronous FL algorithms, such as the concurrency level and routing probabilities, and we leverage this knowledge to optimize loss. We characterize in particular a fundamental trade-off for optimizing asynchronous FL: minimizing gradient estimation errors by avoiding model parameter staleness, while also speeding up the system by increasing the throughput of model updates. Our two main contributions can be summarized as follows. First, we prove a discrete variant of Little's law to derive a closed-form expression for relative delay, a metric that quantifies staleness. This allows us to efficiently minimize the average loss per model update, which has been the gold standard in literature to date. Second, we observe that naively optimizing this metric leads us to slow down the system drastically by overemphazing staleness at the detriment of throughput. This motivates us to introduce an alternative metric that also takes system speed into account, for which we derive a tractable upper-bound that can be minimized numerically. Extensive numerical results show that these optimizations enhance accuracy by 10% to 30%.