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Abstract - VARS-FL: Validation-Aligned Client Selection for Non-IID Federated Learning in IoT Systems
Federated learning (FL) systems typically employ stateless client selection, treating each communication round independently and ignoring accumulated evidence of client contribution quality. Under non-IID data, this leads to slow convergence and unstable training, particularly when selection relies on local proxies (e.g., training loss) that are misaligned with the global optimization objective. These challenges are especially pronounced in Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, where data is highly heterogeneous and distributed across devices observing different traffic patterns. In this paper, we propose VARS-FL (Validation-Aligned Reputation Scoring for Federated Learning), a client selection framework that quantifies each client's contribution using the reduction in server-side validation loss induced by its update. These per-round signals are aggregated into a Reputation score that combines a sliding-window average of recent contributions with a logarithmically scaled participation term, enabling robust exploration-exploitation selection. VARS-FL requires no changes to local training or aggregation and remains fully compatible with standard FedAvg. We evaluate VARS-FL on a 15-class non-IID IoT intrusion detection task using the Edge-IIoTset dataset, with 100 clients across multiple seeds, and compare it against FedAvg, Oort, and Power-of-Choice. VARS-FL consistently improves accuracy, F1-Macro, and loss, while accelerating convergence (up to 36% fewer rounds to reach 80% accuracy). These results demonstrate that validation-aligned, history-aware client selection provides a more reliable and efficient training process for federated learning in heterogeneous IoT environments.
VARS-FL:面向物联网系统中非独立同分布数据的验证对齐客户端选择方法 /
VARS-FL: Validation-Aligned Client Selection for Non-IID Federated Learning in IoT Systems
1️⃣ 一句话总结
为解决物联网场景中数据分布不均导致联合学习收敛慢的问题,本文提出VARS-FL框架,通过实时衡量各客户端更新对服务器验证损失的真实贡献,并利用滑动窗口信誉评分机制动态优选参与训练的客户端,在不改动本地训练流程的前提下,显著提升模型精度、收敛速度(减少最多36%的通信轮次)和稳定性。