Optimized Federated Knowledge Distillation with Distributed Neural Architecture Search

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing data. However, real-world deployments must simultaneously address statistical heterogeneity across client data (non-IID), system heterogeneity in device capabilities, and communication efficiency. Existing FL approaches mitigate these challenges through improved aggregation, personalization, or knowledge distillation, but they almost universally assume a fixed client architecture, limiting adaptability to heterogeneous data complexity and hardware constraints. This architectural constraint often leads to suboptimal trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency in real-world FL systems. This work introduces FedKDNAS, a distillation-driven FL framework that combines client-side neural architecture selection with distillation of server-coordinated knowledge. Each client autonomously selects a lightweight model under accuracy-resource constraints. It then trains it locally using a hybrid objective combining supervised learning and knowledge distillation and shares only predictions on a public reference set. The server then aggregates and smooths these predictions, optionally combining them with a teacher model, to produce stable distillation targets for the next round. Extensive evaluation on six datasets against six representative FL baselines (FedAvg, Ditto, FedMD, FedDF, FedDistill, Local-KD) demonstrates that FedKDNAS consistently achieves superior Pareto efficiency, improving accuracy by up to 15\% under non-IID conditions, reducing client CPU usage by approximately 28\%, and decreasing communication overhead by up to 44 times while maintaining lightweight logit-based communication.