FedLoRE: Communication-Efficient and Personalized Edge Intelligence Framework via Federated Low-Rank Estimation

Federated learning (FL) has recently garnered significant attention in edge intelligence. However, FL faces two major challenges: First, statistical heterogeneity can adversely impact the performance of the global model on each client. Second, the model transmission between server and clients leads to substantial communication overhead. Previous works often suffer from the trade-off issue between these seemingly competing goals, yet we show that it is possible to address both challenges simultaneously. We propose a novel communication-efficient personalized FL framework for edge intelligence that estimates the low-rank component of the training model gradient and stores the residual component at each client. The low-rank components obtained across communication rounds have high similarity, and sharing these components with the server can significantly reduce communication overhead. Specifically, we highlight the importance of previously neglected residual components in tackling statistical heterogeneity, and retaining them locally for training model updates can effectively improve the personalization performance. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis of the convergence guarantee of our framework. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 89.18% reduction in communication overhead and 91.00% reduction in computation overhead while maintaining comparable personalization accuracy compared to previous works.