FLASH-RL: Federated Learning Addressing System and Static Heterogeneity
  using Reinforcement Learning
Sofiane Bouaziz Hadjer Benmeziane Youcef Imine Leila Hamdad Smail Niar Hamza Ouarnoughi
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising Machine Learning paradigm,
enabling multiple users to collaboratively train a shared model while
preserving their local data. To minimize computing and communication costs
associated with parameter transfer, it is common practice in FL to select a
subset of clients in each training round. This selection must consider both
system and static heterogeneity. Therefore, we propose FLASH-RL, a framework
that utilizes Double Deep QLearning (DDQL) to address both system and static
heterogeneity in FL. FLASH-RL introduces a new reputation-based utility
function to evaluate client contributions based on their current and past
performances. Additionally, an adapted DDQL algorithm is proposed to expedite
the learning process. Experimental results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets have
shown FLASH-RL's effectiveness in achieving a balanced trade-off between model
performance and end-to-end latency against existing solutions. Indeed, FLASH-RL
reduces latency by up to 24.83% compared to FedAVG and 24.67% compared to
FAVOR. It also reduces the training rounds by up to 60.44% compared to FedAVG
and +76% compared to FAVOR. In fall detection using the MobiAct dataset,
FLASH-RL outperforms FedAVG by up to 2.82% in model's performance and reduces
latency by up to 34.75%. Additionally, FLASH-RL achieves the target performance
faster, with up to a 45.32% reduction in training rounds compared to FedAVG.