Auction-guided model diffusion for communication-efficient federated learning on non-IID data

Abstract

In 6G mobile communication systems, various AI-based network functions and applications have been standardized. Federated learning (FL) is adopted as the core learning architecture for 6G systems to avoid privacy leakage from mobile user data. However, in FL, users with non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) datasets can deteriorate the performance of the global model because the convergence direction of the gradient for each dataset is different, thereby inducing a weight divergence problem. To address this problem, we propose a novel diffusion strategy for machine learning (ML) models (FedDif) to maximize the performance of the global model with non-IID data. FedDif enables the local model to learn different distributions before parameter aggregation by passing the local models to users via device-to-device communication. Furthermore, we theoretically demonstrate that FedDif can circumvent the weight-divergence problem. Based on this theory, we propose a communication-efficient diffusion strategy for ML models that can determine the trade-off between learning performance and communication cost using auction theory. The experimental results show that FedDif improves the top-1 test accuracy by up to 20.07 %p and reduces communication costs by up to 45.27 % compared to FedAvg. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.