Title:FANS: Federated Adaptive Network Search Learning for Heterogeneous Devices

Abstract:Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HFL) aims to train models across devices with diverse resource budgets while preserving data privacy. Existing HFL methods typically bind training to a small predefined menu of model configurations, which limits architectural coverage. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Federated Adaptive Network Search (FANS), a hypernetwork-based framework that learns a shared architecture space rather than a fixed set of client models. To optimize this shared space efficiently, we propose the Federated Parallel Scaling (FPS) algorithm, which jointly trains multiple sampled subnetworks in parallel with self-distillation so that larger sampled subnetworks can supervise smaller ones during local updates. We evaluate FANS on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNLI using ResNet-18, DenseNet-121, and BERT-base, respectively. Across all benchmarks, FANS expands the feasible subnetwork pool by orders of magnitude (e.g., 4,680 candidates for ResNet-18 vs. 4 in existing methods) and improves the average accuracy-efficiency trade-off relative to representative HFL baselines. Device heterogeneity is emulated through resource tiers, and evaluation covers accuracy, parameter count, and MACs.

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