Connectivity-Aware Client Selection in Decentralized Federated Learning

Usevalad Milasheuski, Monica Nicoli, Stefano Savazzi

Decentralized federated learning (DFL) has emerged as a scalable alternative to centralized federated learning, removing the single point of failure and communication bottleneck at the server. However, most existing decentralized approaches rely on full-neighborhood broadcasting, where each client transmits its model update to all of its neighbors in each communication round. While effective, this results in significant communication overhead and high energy consumption. This paper applies spectral graph tools as lightweight client selection methods that leverage the graph topology by analyzing the spectral properties of the graph Laplacian over a fixed communication graph. Specifically, we exploit eigenvector embeddings and heat/diffusion kernel similarities to guide each client in selecting only a subset of structurally relevant neighbors, i.e., those that are most beneficial for the convergence of the federation process. This topology aware randomization matches or outperforms uniform neighborhood subsampling and approaches the accuracy of full broadcasting. The largest gains, about $3$ percentage points, emerge under strong data heterogeneity on larger, structurally rich…