FedAPTA: Federated Multi-task Learning in Computing Power Networks with Adaptive Layer-wise Pruning and Task-aware Aggregation

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) has shown considerable promise in Computing Power Networks (CPNs) for privacy protection, efficient data utilization, and dynamic collaboration. Although it offers practical benefits, applying FL in CPNs continues to encounter a major obstacle, i.e., multi-task deployment. However, existing work mainly focuses on mitigating FL's computation and communication overhead of a single task while overlooking the computing resource wastage issue of heterogeneous devices across multiple tasks in FL under CPNs. To tackle this, we design FedAPTA, a federated multi-task learning framework in CPNs. FedAPTA alleviates computing resource wastage through the developed layer-wise model pruning technique, which reduces local model size while considering both data and device heterogeneity. To aggregate structurally heterogeneous local models of different tasks, we introduce a heterogeneous model recovery strategy and a task-aware model aggregation method that enables the aggregation through infilling local model architecture with the shared global model and clustering local models according to their specific tasks. We deploy FedAPTA on a realistic FL platform and benchmark it against nine SOTA FL methods. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that the proposed FedAPTA considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art FL methods by up to 4.23%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhenzovo/FedCPN.